Lessons: Scaling Up Successful Efforts To Reduce Poverty

The year-long learning process culminating in the working conference in Shanghai has generated a rich sample of real life experiences about how countries and institutions have scaled up poverty reduction efforts. During the past year, development experts from the developing world prepared more than 100 case studies , analyzing four factors thought to be common to successful experiences of scaling up poverty reduction - institutional change, experimentation and learning, political leadership and commitment, and supportive external environment.

The learning process confirmed that there is no simple design for success, and that success and failure depend primarily on governments and institutions. But is has also verified that many of the successes were a result of countries and communities learning from each other, and refining those lessons through adaptation and experimentation. In addition, it showed that scaling up poverty reduction can be initiated by either significant growth-oriented policy changes, blueprint programs that can be easily replicated, or practices that require customization to local conditions and tailoring based on local knowledge and experience. Most development efforts have elements of all three categories, in different degrees.

The analysis of the cases substantiates much of what we already know about the long, messy, and unpredictable process of getting to scale. However, it also sheds new light on four key areas:

	Getting the economics and the politics right.
	Accelerating poverty reduction requires broad-based and inclusive growth, as the cases of China, Chile, and Poland illustrate. China increased economic opportunities in agriculture, opened to foreign trade and investment, and encouraged labor mobility for the rural poor. Chile's annual growth of 6.1 percent from 1990 to 2000, accompanied by poverty reduction rates of 20 percent over this period, was achieved by combining sound macroeconomic policies with priority social investments and solid institutional reforms. Poland's growth strategy was based mainly on employment creation, while providing temporary social safety nets to reduce the negative effects of adjustment on poor people. There is little disagreement on the broad set of economic policies to be followed but the challenge lies in getting the politics right.
	Getting the focus on clients right and maintaining it.
	The cases demonstrate that there are many ways to deliver quality services to clients. The simple principle of customer service-providing products and services tailored to people's needs-leads to participation, ownership, and purchases by clients. It underpins every story of scaling up, irrespective of the service. Transparent rules of the game - budgets, processes, procedures - lead to increased accountability to clients and empowers them to demand what is their due, a principle re-enacted many times in the case sample.
	Getting the implementation right by focusing on the details.
	Many of the new lessons from Shanghai lie in implementation. The development literature, in contrast to the management literature, has largely ignored the underlying processes and systems for institutions to innovate, fail along the way, learn from that failure, and continue to expand.
	Getting the support for innovation right.
	Behind every success is a leader or a group of visionaries and champions backed by a significant interest group. Once leadership and political commitment are in place, external support can help in scaling up. External financing helped in almost all the cases, in varying degree. It was especially critical for the very poor countries. And without it, many of these experiences would have perished in infancy. For many countries, coordinating external financing with their budget cycle was particularly useful.

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