Supporting Scale Up

We develop and maintain community ownership and organisational capacity to support scaling up of programmes.

Scaling up activities can have a significant impact on the internal dynamics of an organisation.  When planning and implementing scaling up strategies, we need to ensure:

  • effective leadership and management of the internal implications of scaling up, including assessment of financial and human resource needs, the appropriateness of our organisational structure, maintenance of organisational cohesiveness and continuity and whether the pace of scaling up is appropriate to our organisational capacity over time
  • timely and participatory processes that involve staff and volunteers in designing, implementing, monitoring and evaluating scaling up
  • assessment of existing staff and volunteer capacity and provision of appropriate training and development based on assessed needs
  • that staff and volunteers are supported in their work, including in the development of realistic work plans, and
  • that the process of scaling up fosters a learning environment, including building capacity of staff and volunteers to document, reflect upon and analyse their experiences and the experiences of communities about what has and has not worked, to inform organisational development and evaluation of programmes.

The involvement of PLHIV and affected communities in the scaling up process and their ownership of programmes are essential to effective scaling up. A particular challenge in scaling up is to balance the need to involve communities and remain responsive to community need while being realistic about the necessary compromises to accountability and quality in order to expand the reach of the programme. When planning and implementing strategies for scaling up, we need to ensure:

  • scaling up is built on existing strengths of community initiatives, and community ownership of programmes is sustained as they are bought to scale
  • consideration is given to fostering awareness of those in the community whose needs are not being met by existing programmes, particularly those who may be isolated from access to programmes as a result of stigma and discrimination, and
  • PLHIV and affected communities are involved in the design, implementation and evaluation of scaling up.