The Scale Fund supported large projects which applied tested and proven approaches to providing sustainable pathways out of extreme poverty, by providing and enabling the accumulation of assets, improving incomes, decreasing dependency and vulnerability, and increasing food security. The Scale Fund ran from March 2009 until December 2015, funding 14 NGOs with extensive experience in implementing tailored poverty alleviation models and approaches. NGOs were selected for funding using a competitive process driven by an Independent Assessment Panel (IAP), through four separate Rounds of Calls for Proposals, as follows:
– Round 1, spanning six years over two phases, covered a broad spectrum of issues facing the extreme poor in urban and rural areas
– Round 2 explicitly funded activities in some of the most challenging areas; the Chittagong Hill Tracts, the waterlogged haor areas, and the disaster-prone southern coastal belt
– Round 3 was the “Scale Up” round, dedicated to taking innovations proven under the Innovation Fund to scale
– Round 4, the “Scale Out” round, added additional beneficiary households to existing SF partner projects.
EEP/Shiree has consolidated the lessons and experiences detailed in these evaluations into a thematic Scale Fund Synthesis Report : the lessons will be of interest to future programme designers and implementers.
These lessons have been summarised into short, standalone thematic summaries, as listed below:
As part of project closure activities, each Scale Fund project funded an external evaluation that looked to capture results and some lessons that had been learned, and these reports are available on each partner NGO’s page.
In 2013, EEP monitoring data indicated that some of the beneficiary households were unable to make progress towards graduation. A Supplementary Support fund (SSF) of £2.2 million was created, and additional support was provided to 14,725 failing households in the Scale Fund in order to help them to graduate.
Identification of and provision of support to failing households was a multi-stage process. Initial identification was through a mobile phone based Graduation Monitoring System (GMS), which was then validated through a Participatory Rapid Appraisal (PRA) by EEP/Shiree programme managers.
Household Recovery Plans (HHRPs) were developed by the PNGO field officers in conjunction with each beneficiary, and a selection validated by EEP. These plans examined the causes of failure, the preferred asset under SSF, beneficiary capacity, and also anticipated return from the replacement asset. Asset distribution concluded in 2015, and a review of the effectiveness of this support was prepared. You can read the report here.