OCTOBER 2006

Scale-up: The Next Great Challenge

For the past 15 years — working in partnership with the people and leaders of eight countries in East, West and Southern Africa — The Hunger Project has developed a replicable, affordable, bottom-up methodology that has proven successful for overcoming hunger and poverty in rural Africa.

Called the “epicenter strategy,” it creates dynamic centers for community action to meet basic needs, and focal points for effectively linking people to government resources.

The epicenter strategy transforms the culture of dependency, resignation and gender discrimination to a culture of responsibility, self-reliance and gender equality.

Through four clearly articulated phases over five years, it takes people from abject poverty to self-reliance. The epicenter strategy is already empowering more than three million people to achieve lasting progress in health, education, nutrition and family income.

Experts now agree that the next big challenge in Africa is to take successful interventions to the national scale — in other words, to scale up. This point was underscored in the reports of the UN Millennium Project. To meet this challenge, The Hunger Project has launched a bold new initiative to demonstrate — for the first time — that scale-up is possible in Africa, and that a bottom-up, gender-focused approach is a viable alternative for the entire continent. Our first demonstration of scale-up will be complete coverage of the Eastern Region of Ghana.

Scaling up goes beyond the Eastern Region. It includes a commitment to ensure that “best practices” — the best innovations from different epicenters — become available at all epicenters. Scale-up will also include state-of-the-art independent evaluation of the impact of the work.

This is the largest and most long-term initiative we have ever launched — and not only in financial terms. Scaling up requires success in areas where humanity has often failed — authentic partnership between women and men, effective collaboration and cooperation among agencies, and bridging the gap between local government and the people.

The Epicenter Strategy: Five Years to Self-Reliance

Phase One: Mobilization

The purpose of phase one, which takes up to one year, is for villagers to create a vision of a future free from hunger, commit to realize their vision, and inspire and organize people to take self-reliant action.

The first step is for The Hunger Project to meet with local government representatives to apprise them of our approach and gain their support.

We then give the Vision, Commitment and Action Workshop (VCAW): first at the district level for government officers and invited representatives from villages, and then at the village level to several hundred villagers. The VCAW begins to change the mind-set from resignation to “Hunger can end — it can be done!” and from dependency, “Governments will do it,” to “I’m the one.” In the VCAW, people also begin to understand the negative effects of gender inequality.

Leaders begin to emerge, and an equal number of women and men are trained as volunteer animators who inspire their fellow villagers to set priorities and take action.

Individuals and small groups launch animator-initiated projects as “homework” for the VCAW. Projects may include rebuilding schools, planting vegetable gardens or launching small businesses. People gain real confidence when they succeed at their first self-reliant project.

Functional literacy classes for women start at the village level. This opens a whole new world, and women begin to see themselves differently.

We begin organizing the African Woman Food Farmer Initiative (AWFFI), through which The Hunger Project provides microcredit loans. Women come together, form loan groups, select their leadership, and for the first time in their lives, contemplate earning a cash income and having economic power.

Throughout phase one, each village in the cluster tends to work on its own. Phase one is complete when villages begin to work together as a larger community with real economic and political strength — which we call an epicenter — and elect an epicenter committee to lead them in phase two.

Phase Two: The Tipping Point

During phase two, which also takes approximately one year, the cluster of villages works together and constructs its epicenter building.

The villagers get approximately five acres of land donated for both the building and a community farm. The Hunger Project secures clear title to the land, and hires a contractor to train the people to make bricks and supervise the construction.

The villagers build the epicenter building, which houses a food bank, credit union, health center, library, community meeting hall, preschool, classrooms for literacy training and food-processing equipment. The building becomes a symbol of partnership, self-reliance and community unity. It’s an achievement that is almost unimaginable to the villagers. The successful construction of the epicenter building is the tipping point in the five-year process. Once this has been achieved, the process of calling forth self-reliance becomes irreversible.

   

Also during phase two, the AWFFI loan committee begins providing loans to women’s groups.

Another important intervention of this phase is that The Hunger Project begins delivering the HIV/AIDS and Gender Inequality Workshop, coordinated by the health committee.

Local government provides nurses, teachers and supplies for the preschool and health clinic.

We know that phase two has been successful when the epicenter building is formally inaugurated at a big public assembly with senior government leaders in attendance.

Phase Three: Progress on All Fronts

In phase three, for up to three years, the people in the epicenter make progress on all fronts, including solidifying and creating an even more powerful partnership with local government.

Food Farming: With access to training and credit, women grow more and better food. On the community farm, farmers learn how to use new seeds, small-scale irrigation systems and composting techniques to improve their crops. They diversify crops and use food-processing equipment to reduce drudgery and preserve food. The food bank is stocked from the community farm, and stabilizes prices for farmers as well as protects against shortages.

Income: With better production and better prices, incomes increase. In addition, with training and credit, people invest in income-generating activities, such as raising goats, chickens, pigs and cows, food processing, sewing and tie-dying.

Health: The health clinic provides basic treatment, first-aid and nutrition education. Villagers are able to treat and prevent diarrhea, TB, measles and malaria. There are immunizations and health records for all children, pre- and postnatal classes for women, and trained midwives and traditional birth attendants from the epicenters. The sanitary latrine reduces disease, and the villages can afford to bore wells for safe drinking water. Because of the HIV/AIDS and Gender Inequality Workshop, more men and women use condoms and seek voluntary testing for HIV.

Education: With increased family income, more girls and boys stay in school. The preschool frees women’s time for more education, training and participation as leaders. Animators reach out to remote villages to build more classrooms. Men as well as women begin participating in adult literacy classes.

 

Gender Equality: Through equality of leadership, the AWFFI program and the HIV/AIDS and Gender Inequality Workshop, women gain confidence. There is greater respect from men, and more authentic partnership. In addition, two women from each village receive training in legal literacy and reproductive health, becoming “barefoot lawyers” — village-level resources to women about their rights.

The AWFFI bank successfully places and recovers loans, keeps records and mobilizes savings. The women who run the bank take classes to pass the government exams, so that the loan program can become an official, government-recognized rural bank — a first in Africa!

Phase Four: Self-Reliance

Once the epicenter bank is officially recognized, no further financial support from The Hunger Project is necessary. The transformation that has taken place over five years is summarized here.

Before launching the epicenter strategy	After the epicenter reaches self-reliance
People live in dependency and resignation, with almost no hope for a better future.	People are successful authors of their own development: motivated, confident, improving life every day.
People live in isolated small villages, divided by rivalries.	People work together as a community that is large enough to be a viable economic unit. Leadership is established.
Women are the poorest, work the hardest, and have no voice in society.	Women have equal leadership with men, and are key economic players in society. Many women run for local office and are elected.
There is no opportunity for women to become literate.	All women participating in the credit program must enroll in literacy and numeracy courses.
Government programs never reach the people living in remote, isolated villages.	The community has the confidence and strength in numbers to successfully demand services, such as roads and electricity.
People are poorly nourished, eating one meal per day and suffering seasonal hunger.	People are adequately and well-nourished, and successfully manage their own food security through the community food bank.
Farmers raise a staple subsistence crop.	Farming is diversified, improved and successful in the marketplace. People are cultivating vegetables and fish, and raising poultry and livestock.
The majority of children are not in school, particularly girls.	Both girls and boys attend pre- and primary schools near their homes. There is a library filled with books.
People have no health care. Infant and maternal mortality rates (IMR and MMR) are tragically high.	People have reliable health care. The MMR and IMR drop dramatically.
Fueled by gender inequality, HIV/AIDS is out of control.	Both women and men are halting dangerous practices that spread HIV/AIDS.
Any cash that people have is idle.	Through the bank, savings are mobilized as investment capital for community enterprises.
Men often migrate to the cities to find cash employment.	There is a vibrant rural economy. Men begin returning to the community.

 

Philanthropy in Action Does Scale-up Include Me? By Mimi Evans, Director of Philanthropy me@thp.org There is a great deal of talk about scale-up around The Hunger Project now — about building epicenters in the Eastern Region of Ghana. But we may not realize that scale-up means far more than epicenters.
Scale-up means growth: first, the visible growth and activity around an epicenter (seen firsthand by many investors on our leadership trips to		Hunger Project investor Tove Jensen from Sweden with a partner in Ghana

Africa). And second, the less visible but powerful growth that takes place within the villagers as they work together, moving into a better future. But there is more — the growth within ourselves as their partners, and as people in our own hometowns.

As we are scaled-up personally, we recognize it as both liberating and challenging. No matter how old we are, can we grow? Are we up to it?

This goes for The Hunger Project as an organization, too. Can we grow? Are we up to it?

As we celebrate our recent US$5 million, five-year challenge grant for scale-up in Ghana, The Hunger Project must also scale itself up to meet this challenge. We are a 29-year-old organization with an impressive, highly successful record of changing millions of lives around the world. We are now called upon to make a giant and immediate leap forward, scaling up everything we do — in Ghana, yes, but also in New York, Chicago, Phoenix, Hamburg, London, Amsterdam, Sydney, and at home, wherever we are.

This transformation, this scale-up, begins with the beat of one heart and moves around the world. We can do it! What role will you play?

“Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson