Poised for scale, primed for investment

Devex
By Michelle Nunn

Michelle Nunn, president and CEO of CARE, addresses the audience during CARE’s Scale X Design Challenge event in Brooklyn, New York. Photo by: Carey Wagner / CARE

Maruf Azam drew a harmonica from his pocket and began playing for the 275 of us who had packed into the New Lab Design and Technology Center in Brooklyn, New York. And while the Bangladeshi tune was traditional, the event was anything but.

Azam was trying to convince a panel of expert judges and a live and online voting audience that Krishi Utsho — a network of shops selling quality supplies and services to smallholder dairy farmers in rural Bangladesh — was ready to be scaled up to improve the lives of millions. By the end of the night, three of the five teams who had made the finals of CARE’s Scale X Design Challenge would be awarded $150,000 cash prizes to help them scale up community-based development projects fast to dramatically increase their impact.

But Azam had stiff competition.

Four other finalist teams had traveled their own long distances — from Cambodia, Tanzania and Rwanda — unpacking both their own visions for scaling and a desire to win a challenge that, while unique in the poverty-fighting world, does have some roots in CARE’s history. CARE itself was founded in 1945 to deliver on a simple, innovative idea: to save the lives of World War II survivors by sending them CARE Packages full of food and supplies.

Over the next few decades, CARE delivered 100 million of them to families throughout Europe and around the world, adapting the packages to meet local diets and local needs, from seed and farm tools to school supplies. The CARE Package went to scale — by design. Today, more than 70 years later, our Scale X Design Challenge is built on that same belief in innovation as a timeless tool to save more lives, alleviate more poverty and achieve more social justice in a world rife with challenges.

Scale comes by design

Despite the remarkable progress that the global community has made in cutting extreme poverty in half over the past couple of decades, more than 800 million people still live on less than $2 a day. Enormous need and inequities remain. Armed conflict, disease, natural disasters, political hurdles and social norms challenge us to create new and innovative approaches to overcoming entrenched poverty.

We have to do more and in new ways.

By the end of the decade, CARE aims to support 200 million people from the most vulnerable and excluded communities as they defeat poverty and achieve social injustice. Innovation is key to that — not only in reaching them, but in reaching them faster.

So if a great idea is breakthrough in its ability to help people lift themselves out of poverty, we want to replicate that success across entire countries, regions and, in some cases, the world, but we can’t simply wave a magic wand and say “scale.” It takes great forethought, intention and investment. In other words, scale comes by design.

“Today’s best ideas come from the men and women working in communities around the world who understand what works in specific and often challenging contexts.”
— Michelle Nunn, president and CEO, CARE

It’s about bringing people together around the most innovative ideas in the development field so that — through investment, partnership and mentorship — we can deepen our collective impact around the world by taking those ideas to scale, faster.

The challenge was the pinnacle of our inaugural Scale X Design Accelerator, a first-of-its-kind platform drawing on many private sector examples to rapidly design, test, learn, iterate and implement what we know already works.

Innovation, impact, and alliances

Over the decades at CARE, we’ve seen how long it can take for our most promising programs to reach scale, and we all know a similar lag applies throughout the development field. It’s a problem. So as we thought of how to close that gap between innovation and impact, we asked ourselves, how can we do more — better and faster? Which CARE programs are having the greatest impact? How can we scale them? What can we learn from others and where is the nexus between innovation and international development? Our answer was — and is — Scale X Design.

The first cohort of 15 teams that followed the accelerator curriculum — and ultimately competed for the combined $450,000 — were all CARE projects. But our aim going forward is to engage other organizations, other projects and ideas, other team leaders — maybe even a harmonica or two — in order to accelerate the pace at which the world’s best development programs reach the people who need them most. We need unlikely alliances and the creativity generated from diversity.

Scale X Design represents the future of innovation and scale at CARE, and, more broadly, we believe it’s a leap forward in social development, helping to shape a future in which we all work together to tackle — and overcome — the world’s greatest challenges.

The future for innovation

Regardless of the winners in this particular competition, we know that today’s best ideas come from the men and women working in communities around the world who understand what works in specific and often challenging contexts. Those ideas just need the investment to move them exponentially forward. The five teams that competed in Brooklyn represent some of our best investments in the future that CARE envisions: A world of hope, tolerance and social justice, where poverty has been overcome and all people live with dignity and security.

Innovation can take us there together, but only if we scale up the innovations that are working best and changing lives.