# **Why is scaling up programs so challenging?**

There are a variety of reasons why program impacts may become smaller as programs are taken to scale. These can include programs having different effects on different types of people, implementation and political economy issues, and cost challenges.

- **Small‐scale pilots may concentrate efforts on those who benefit most** _._ It is natural for those planning a pilot to target the most promising households or locations first, where they think the program will have most effect. Any program expansion is then likely to involve relaxing eligibility criteria to include those who may not have such large benefits from the program. This is seen clearly in a study of electricity conservation programs carried out in the United States.<sup>78</sup> The power company began this program by targeting locations it thought would benefit most from the program, and subsequent expansion to new areas had much smaller effects. This was also one of the reasons behind less impact in the Bangladesh migration example, since scaling up the program meant relaxing eligibility requirements and offering loans to many households for whom lack of credit may not have been the binding constraint.

- **Implementation and political economy issues can arise as programs grow.** Small‐scale pilots are often closely monitored and implemented with a degree of oversight that becomes challenging to carry out at large scales. This is particularly the case once the government becomes involved in implementation, where a combination of low state capacity, poor bureaucratic management, and capture by vested interests can seriously degrade the quality of the program offered. This was a key feature for the lack of success of government implementation of the Kenyan school reform, as resistance from teacher unions helped prevent the new contracts from working as intended.

- **General equilibrium effects can further reduce some impacts.** Pilot programs to train a small number of workers may be successful in helping them find new jobs, but when large numbers are trained, they may end up competing with one another for a limited set of jobs and the impact on employment could be much lower.

- **Cost issues can make scaling prohibitive.** Programs that have large and promising effects when delivered to small numbers of households or firms are often very intensive and expensive, making them challenging to scale up from a fiscal standpoint.

# **What can be done to enhance the impacts of programs at scale?**

It is not simply enough to see which programs are successful in reaching large numbers of people in a cost‐effective way. Microfinance is a good example of an institution that has managed to do this but has come under increasing scrutiny for not delivering the transformative development benefits that its proponents promised.<sup>79</sup> Instead, efforts to scale up programs should:

> 78 <mark>Allcott, Hunt “Site Selection Bias in Program Evaluation”, Quarterly Journal of Economics 130 (3, August 2015): 1117‐1165.</mark>

> 79 <mark>Admittedly, a key part of the problem may have been overly optimistic expectations for microcredit among some proponents. Its failure to lift recipients out of poverty thus far does not imply that microcredit is not a useful financial tool for many poor households. See Cull, Robert, Asli Demirguc‐Kunt, and Jonathan Morduch. “The Microfinance Business Model: Enduring Subsidy and Modest Profit</mark> ,” _<mark>World Bank Economic Review</mark>_ <mark>,</mark> 32 (2): 221 <mark>‐244. June 2018</mark> .

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