News

Spark Health Africa webinar: Public sector scaling of innovations in East Africa

October 17, 2022

Planning for scaling should be accomplished with the end in mind, and scaling actors should adopt a mindset for scale. These were two of the takeaways from the  20 September webinar cosponsored by ExpandNet and Spark Health Africa. The session, entitled Key learnings from public sector scaling of innovations in East Africa, brought together speakers from government and implementing partners to share their organizational experience with scaling public health and educational interventions.

The following featured speakers presented valuable experiences and insights about scaling up:

Edward Kataika, The East, Central, and Southern Africa (ECSA) Health Community

Easter Okello, Lake Region Economic Bloc (LREB) of Kenya

Paul Nyachae, The East Africa Hub of The Challenge Initiative (TCI)

The panel was moderated by Dr. Richard Chivaka, Founder and CEO of Spark Health Africa, and Laura Ghiron, Member of the ExpandNet Secretariat.

You can stay up to date about future events with Spark Health Africa by joining the Learning Network on Scaling Innovations in the Public Sector Across Sub-Saharan Africa, an initiative between Spark Health Africa and VillageReach. Additionally you are welcome to join the Community of Practice on Scaling Development Outcomes, where ExpandNet leads the Health Technical Working Group which co-sponsored the event.

The recording of the 90-minute webinar can be viewed at this link.

MacArthur Foundation features ExpandNet in Population & Reproductive Health News

August 17, 2022

Reflecting on 18 years of MacArthur Foundation support to ExpandNet: The MacArthur Foundation’s Population & Reproductive Health team featured a recent blog with an interview with ExpandNet Secretariat member Laura Ghiron to discuss the network’s history, legacy and future directions. The Foundation has been a critical and steadfast champion of ExpandNet’s work since its inception in 2003 when the process of scaling up was less-widely discussed. The post in MacArthur’s Population & Reproductive Health News features written excerpts and a video from a much longer interview, and includes a few photos of ExpandNet work across development sectors over the past 18 years of MacArthur Foundation support.

WHO Webinar: Success stories on scaling up adolescent sexual and reproductive health programming in Chile, England, Ethiopia and Jamaica

July 13, 2022

ExpandNet co-sponsored a webinar on 22 June to highlight how four countries have managed to dramatically reduce adolescent pregnancy over the past 20 years by successfully scaling up tested interventions.

In the years following the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development, remarkable progress has been made on adolescent sexual and reproductive health. Many countries have implemented and sustained programs at a large scale with demonstrated successes. The experiences of Chile, England, Ethiopia and Jamaica were showcased in the 95-minute webinar co-hosted with the World Health Organization, Medicus Mundi Switzerland, the African Institute for Development Policy, Exemplars in Global Health, the Geneva Foundation for Medical Education and Research, the Women’s Center of Jamaica Foundation, and the IBP network.

The following speakers (in order of appearance) provided insight into how the four countries put the reduction of adolescent pregnancy and child bearing on their national agendas, outlined steps taken to address the most vulnerable girls/young women, and delineated how each country scaled up and sustained their programs:

Alison Hadley Obe, Director, Teenage Pregnancy Knowledge Exchange, Faculty of Health and Social Sciences, University of Bedfordshire

Lemessa Oljira, Team Leader, Adolescent and Youth Health Research Advisory Council, Federal Ministry of Health of Ethiopia

Zoe Simpson, Executive Director, Women’s Centre of Jamaica Foundation

Fernando Gonzalez, Director, Department of Prevention and Disease Control, Ministry of Health, Chile

Nandita Thatte, Technical Officer, Department of Sexual & Reproductive Health & Research, IBP Secretariat, World Health Organization

Naa Dodua Dodoo, PhD, Senior Research and Policy Analyst, African Institute for Development Policy (AFIDEP)

Venkatraman Chandra-Mouli, World Health Organization, Human Reproduction Programme

Laura Ghiron, President, Partners in Expanding Health Quality and Access and Member of the ExpandNet Secretariat

The webinar was facilitated by Carine Weiss, Gender and Youth Team Lead of HIV Prevention Branch, Medicus Mundi Switzerland.

Please access the recording and links to accompanying resources at this link on the Medicus Mundi website.

CUSP Webinar: Considering scaling up from a feminist perspective

March 15, 2022

According to the Community for Understanding Scale Up (CUSP), a feminist perspective implies that we must “recognize the strength of ‘working with communities’ and not ‘working for or on communities,’” and that these suggest profoundly different approaches. Formed from eight organizations that work across several regions on scaling gender-based social norms-shifting approaches, in a webinar on March 30 at 4 pm EAT/9 am EDT, CUSP members will present their recent publication, Enhancing Social Norms Programs: An Invitation to Rethink “Scaling Up” from a Feminist Perspective.

Key learnings from this document include an analysis of metaphors used to describe growth and expansion. Scaling up, CUSP argues, has connotations in the business world that often lead to a focus on quantifying organizational structures and packaged components, and risks overlooking the principles often needed for structural change. The preferable Growth in an ecosystem, by contrast, fosters collaboration across power and place and emphasizes solidarity, shared analysis and vision, with nimble evolving processes that emphasize learning, according to the document.

From 2020 to 2021 CUSP analyzed and described characteristics of expansion and adaptation that are consistent with a feminist approach, and synthesized their conclusions in a 57-page publication. ExpandNet Secretariat and CUSP Member Dr. Rebecka Lundgren published a blog about the publication, available at this link.

Laura Ghiron, of the ExpandNet Secretariat, will provide remarks during the webinar. To register and join the conversation, please register using this link: https://bit.ly/3IusZGe.

ExpandNet scale-up related videos now available

March 9, 2022

In case you would like to take advantage of one of ExpandNet’s prior online learning opportunities and catch up on recent developments in the field of scaling up, we have assembled a variety of videos for viewing in two places. The first place is ExpandNet’s new YouTube video channel which hosts recordings of scaling up content from conferences and webinars over the last couple of years, as well as a “playlist” of additional scale-up related content uploaded by allied organizations. All of our videos are also now on a dedicated Videos page on the ExpandNet website.

Annual Workshop of the CoP on scaling up development outcomes

December 10, 2021

The nexus of scaling and systems change; institutionalizing a scale up focus within government and donor agencies, and identifying principles of scale up across disciplines; these were some of the themes of the November 2021 workshop of the Community of Practice on Scaling up Development Outcomes led by Larry Cooley and Johannes Linn.

The annual workshop was held online for the second year in a row and consisted of three cross-sectoral plenaries and nine technical working group sessions, including Health’s, between November 8-23, 2021.

The Health Technical Working Group facilitated a lively conversation on mainstreaming a scaling focus within nongovernmental, technical, and implementing organizations. Key lessons were discussed, including creating a shared vision with those intended to adopt the interventions on a wider scale, incorporating attention to scale up from Day 1, and developing a scale up mindset across  partnerships.

The objective of the workshop was to come away with key takeaways for developing the CoP program of work for 2022 and beyond.

The purpose of the Scaling CoP, which now has more than 1200 members, is to bring together experts and practitioners interested in scaling the impact of development interventions, to professionalize the field of scale up and to exchange experience and share knowledge about what works for scaling across sectors.

To join the Scaling Community of Practice and to gain access to the annual meeting recordings, view working papers and access past newsletters that contain cutting edge work of members, please visit this page.

 

FP2030 Connecting Conversations: ExpandNet moderates global panel on scaling AYSRH programming

November 12, 2021

“If you design your interventions, with stakeholders, for the system, and with the resources that exist in the system in mind, then you’re more likely to arrive to a scalable and more cost-appropriate model,” ExpandNet Secretariat Member Laura Ghiron said in wapping up the panel discussion on scaling up adolescent and youth sexual and reproductive health programming that was hosted by FP2030 and USAID’s Knowledge SUCCESS Project. She went on to say, “At the same time, we need to accept this is not an overnight process”.

In responding to a question asking what are the necessary components, activities, or requirements for effectively scaling up AYSRH program, Adenike Asiet of Action Health Inc of Nigeria said “A starting out place would be a policy that would guide programming.Then a plan should address the different components: teacher training, access to resource materials for the teachers and learners, mechanisms for classroom delivery, a system for monitoring and evaluation”.

Dr. Galina Lesco of the National Resource Center for Developing Youth-Friendly Health Services in Moldova underscored the importance of demonstrating the effectiveness of an intervention using an evidence-based approach. She also emphasized that “One of the lessons that we learned is to have a sustainable financing mechanism in place for the program before we scale. It is important to have a good economic evaluation of the intervention that we want to scale.”

Brendan Hayes of the World Bank’s Global Financing Facility in Uganda said “I do think that as we are working on adolescent health interventions, thinking about how they would be applied or how they would be delivered through existing government systems is really important. It’s not just about having an intervention that can scale, you need systems surrounding that intervention that can help support and continue quality delivery”.

Discussing the financial constraints associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, Brendan added, “The more we can be aligning our work at country level and be guided by the principles that Adenike and Galina laid out very eloquently, the better. It’s important that those conversations are happening and we’re not spreading ourselves too wide and thin. That doesn’t mean that there’s no room for experimentation, or piloting and trying to push the limits, but I do think that as much as we can, building consensus, and building a critical mass of resources behind some real evidence-based and high-impact interventions… are really important.”

The conversation, which took place on November 11, 2021 was part of a long-running series of conversations on adolescent and youth sexual and reproductive health topics and the recording is viewable in both English and French.

Scale up CoP organizes a series of webinars on monitoring and evaluating the process of institutionalization

September 14, 2021

The Community of Practice (CoP) on Scaling up Development Outcomes, led by Larry Cooley (Management Systems International) and Johannes Linn (Brookings Institution), organized a webinar on the topic of monitoring and evaluating the institutionalization process during scale up. The August 12th session featured guest speakers from two prominent organizations working on scaling community-based health interventions – Last Mile Health and Living Goods. The session, which was the second in a series of four, focused on perspectives around monitoring and evaluating the process by which initiatives effectively become institutionalized in government programs. To view the recording, please visit this page.

The cases of large-scale interventions that are followed through the series come from the education and health sectors, with the intention of identifying lessons that span sectoral silos. The third session highlighted the donor perspective on these issues on September 20th and featured a panel of experts. The workstream will be featured in a plenary session during the upcoming CoP’s annual workshop scheduled for November. Visit the CoP’s website listed above to join the CoP and any of its working groups – including the Health Technical Working Group, led by ExpandNet – and to be kept apprised of the annual meeting registration and other events of interest to the scaling community.

New ExpandNet publication: Promoting Scale-Up Across a Global Project Platform: Lessons from the Evidence to Action Project

July 1, 2021

ExpandNet is pleased to share our latest peer-reviewed scaling-up research, published by Springer Nature in the new journal Global Implementation Research and Application. In the paper, authors Laura Ghiron, Eric Ramirez-Ferrero, Rita Badiani, Regina Benevides, Alexis Ntabona, Peter Fajans and Ruth Simmons highlight how USAID’s global flagship family planning and reproductive health project ‘Evidence to Action’ (E2A) worked with ExpandNet over nine years to implement a scale-up focus in its country activities. The paper provides key learning from this process with the hope that other initiatives can benefit and in turn help countries more rapidly achieve their ambitious Sustainable Development Goals targets and commitments.

Read the open source manuscript here: https://doi.org/10.1007/s43477-021-00013-4

Global Implementation Conference – ExpandNet delivers two sessions on scaling up

June 15, 2021

During the May 2021 proceedings of the bi-annual Global Implementation Conference (GIC), ExpandNet members laid out ExpandNet’s systematic approach to scale up and shared experience from using ExpandNet/WHO tools to achieve scale up results. In an “Ask the Expert” session entitled Scale Up and Sustainability in Global Settings, Dr. Alexis Ntabona from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Laura Ghiron from the United States briefly introduced ExpandNet’s framework and scale-up learning from almost two decades of work and responded to participants’ questions about scaling.

Thereafter, a “Master Class” entitled Experience Using ExpandNet/WHO Tools to Achieve Country Ownership and Sustainable, Scalable Implementation Results featured ExpandNet member Charles Kabiswa from Uganda, Dr. Ntabona and Ms. Ghiron. During this session the speakers shared the ExpandNet/WHO framework, tools and approach followed by scale-up experience from: 1) the integrated population, health and environment project HoPE-LVB in Uganda and Kenya that applied ExpandNet tools from the earliest stages of project conceptualization through to management of the scale-up process; and 2) an effort to accelerate implementation of a national family planning reform agenda for integrating contraceptive care competencies in nursing and midwifery training curricula in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The next GIC is being planned for 2023 in Colorado, USA, with the hope to have even greater global participation. Stay in touch with the Global Implementation Society and the GIC planning at the following website: https://globalimplementation.org

If you would like to submit short news items describing your organizations current scale-up related activities, please do so through the “Contact Us” link
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ExpandNet is an informal network of global health and development professionals who seek to advance the science and practice of scale up.

 
 

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