10/23/2020

Nowhere to Grow

The systematic scale-up of social entrepreneurs’ solutions simply is not a thing

Innovate, prove, and scale: These are the basic marching orders for any social entrepreneur. You’re supposed to “go big or go home,” but the truth is that no matter how good you are, your solution likely won’t achieve its potential unless others—preferably bigger others—begin to replicate and scale it as well. 

We’ve long taught that those others include governments, markets, and other NGOs. But we’ve become dubious about that last one. Despite long-term engagements with the 50+ organizations in the Mulago portfolio, we can’t come up with a single compelling example of scale-up via other, larger NGOs. 

That’s alarming, so we did a little survey. We asked CEOs of Big International NGOs (BINGOs), BINGO board members, and a few select people with a long, broad view of the social sector if they could name one solution from the social entrepreneur world that had been effectively scaled via the BINGOs.

Please select this link to read the complete article from SSIR.