Scaling-up for Agricultural and Community Development

Scaling-up is especially important for agriculture, rural development and nutrition because of persistent global challenge of food security and rural poverty. As early as 1980s, scaling-up emerged as a challenge among NGOs since their interventions were typically small in scale but adapting innovative approaches, dubbed ‘small champions’. Attention to past programs and projects, focused on innovations in agricultural technology and rural development, had little thought of taking ‘pilots’ to scale. To make scaling-up deliberate and successful, we need to take stock of cases by understanding the concept itself, its pathways, spaces to grow, requirements to making it happen, and lessons learned. Scaling-up is not an end by itself but an instrument to achieve the goal of improved lives for the greatest number of people. The global development community responded recently and begun to focus on the need to scale up interventions.