Tool #7

Benchmarking and Tracking Horizontal Scale Up

A planning tool to identify what systems-level results to seek, steps to take, and progress-tracking related to horizontal scale up (reaching more people).

SOURCE: Promising Practices in Scale-Up Monitoring, Learning, and Evaluation: A Compendium of Resources; Benchmark Tables

DOWNLOAD THIS TOOL

As noted earlier in this quick-start guide, vertical scale and horizontal scale must work together to create sustainable scale (see Figure 2). Just as in the vertical scale-up tool that helps us think through institutionalization, it is important to agree upon the desired results in terms of horizontal scale: that is how many sites is it reasonable to add? How many people will you reach? In what time frame? Where will new sites be? These are horizontal scale-up considerations. Setting achievable scale-up results for reaching more people and tracking your progress will help your action plan succeed. Working through this tool and the previous tool (on vertical scale-up) will be useful in refining your results framework and in guiding monitoring and evaluation.

How to use this tool

  1. Vision and brainstorm desired horizontal scale-up results for a specific intervention/activity; organizational and country action plans and strategies.
  2. Analyze the action plan along with outputs of any assessment and planning discussions you have held to determine what reforms in policy are needed to promote horizontal scale.
  3. For each result statement, flag policy, organizational and budgetary reforms that are needed to achieve that result. Brainstorm Joining Forces organizations and partners could take (e.g., advocacy, proposal of inter-ministerial initiatives, etc.) to advance those reforms.
  4. For each result statement, make a plan for results.
  5. Set a measurable indicator for your result statement; plan how your achievement will grow over time.
  6. Check back every 6 months to monitor and track progress.

Children’s Engagement

When using this tool Joining Forces seeks children’s engagement in two distinct ways: 1) integrating information about children’s views and perspectives as it relates to the tool’s topic and 2) as a source of data for each tool. Locating opportunities for child participation and child safeguarding (as separate and complementary) is a shared responsibility of all Joining Forces partners. In this tool, it may be possible to engage children and their families in thinking about expanding coverage to new groups (to be determined by the activity’s objectives) and what would be relevant benchmarks of this expansion. Other ideas for asking children about groups to which coverage of this intervention/activity might be expanded to increase diversity and inclusion can be found in the “Tools and Techniques” compendium provided at the end of this guide.