The Science of Scaling Lab (SOS) is a collaboration between BRAC, BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD) and Y-RISE. The partnership combines the implementation capability of BRAC (one of the world’s largest NGOs), the contextual knowledge and research capacity of BIGD and the expertise of the Y-RISE network on research in the complexities of scaling. In doing so, we aim to accelerate the successful scale-up of promising interventions and to create organizational and field learning around scaling complexities.
Background and Rationale for the SOS Lab
In 1972, the year that BRAC was founded, the infant mortality rate (IMR) in Bangladesh was 166 per 1000 live births. Over the next 20 years, IMR halved, and then halved again in the next 15. What makes this achievement even more astounding is that the country’s spending on public health and education during this period was low relative to other similarly poor countries. So what was the secret?
The NGO sector played a critical role in mobilizing solutions at scale: One of BRAC’s founding projects involved traveling door-to-door to over 10 million households to teach mothers to use readily-available indigenous ingredients to create an oral rehydration solution to feed their infants when they had diarrhea.
This is a success story. But it is also the story of missed opportunities: successful imitation of Bangladesh’s IMR would have averted a several million infant deaths in the rest of South Asia and perhaps the rest of the world over this period.
Scaling complexities and projects
Such replication and scaling are not simple. Responsible scale-up requires a systematic analysis of scaling complexity. It involves asking questions such as:
- How does a program generalize from one setting to another?
- What are the implementation risks and acceptable margins of implementation fidelity in transferring programs from close pilot control to a wider execution network with greater resource constraints?
- What is the cost-effectiveness of a program at scale and how can we optimize this through testing various models, combinations and iterations?
- What could be the political-economy risks of large, visible programs that may go undetected in small pilots?
- Could a program when scaled up have general equilibrium effects, e.g. could a particular training program run at scale distort labor market outcomes or prices?
All these and other questions require tackling the scale-up process with innovations. Such innovations require proven programs with researchers who specialize in understanding scaling complexity and are grounded in local context. Research has shown that investments that already had evidence of impact at the time of applications were seven times more likely to scale while those that included development economics researchers were six times more likely to scale than not (Kremer et al. 2019). Scaling innovations critically require NGOs with formidable implementation capacity who can bring lived experience and contextual knowledge to mitigate implementation, political economy and other risks and draw on lessons to scale quickly and successfully.
The partnership is currently undertaking several projects in the areas of climate change, mental health , entrepreneurship and migration.