Scale-up: the Next Challenge for Africa

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, head of the UN Millennium Project, visits a Hunger Project epicenter in the Eastern Region of Ghana.

The situation today in African development

This is an important moment. Today there is greater public awareness of the real possibility of ending hunger and poverty in Africa than ever before. There is greater official willingness to resolve macro issues of aid, trade and debt. European countries have significantly increased their aid commitments to Africa.

At the same time, and despite the investment of billions of dollars, top-down strategies have failed to make a significant dent in poverty in Africa.

Pioneering a strategy that works

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, people-centered methodology that has proven successful for community development in rural Africa. It is called the epicenter strategy – as it creates dynamic centers for community action to meet basic needs and focal points for effectively linking people to existing government programs and resources.

The epicenter strategy is already empowering more than three million people to achieve lasting progress in health, education, nutrition and family income.

The next big challenge

Experts now agree that the next big challenge in ending hunger and poverty in Africa is to take successful interventions to national scale – in other words, to “scale up.” This point was underscored in the reports of the UN Millennium Project.

Although the response by governments and international agencies to the success of the epicenter strategy has been uniformly positive, it is our hypothesis that, to date, it has not been implemented at a large enough scale to make the effectiveness and affordability of this approach inescapably obvious to policy makers.

The Hunger Project is a catalytic, non-conventional strategic organization that is designed to pioneer strategies to meet each new challenge as it is revealed. We’ve chosen to take on the challenge of proving that scale-up is possible in Africa, beginning with full coverage of the Eastern Region of Ghana.

In order to demonstrate the viability and affordability of scaling-up the epicenter strategy, The Hunger Project will ensure total coverage in the Eastern region – one of Ghana’s 10 regions.

“Total coverage” is defined as ensuring that there is an epicenter within walking distance (10km) of each of the 1.3 million rural residents of the 16 rural districts in the region.

This will require the creation of 112 epicenters, one for each cluster of villages with a total population of 10,000 on average.

In partnership with the Robertson Foundation, we have launched a strategy to create at least 36 epicenters in the next 5 years.

We chose Ghana because it has strong Hunger Project leadership, strong democratic traditions including a good system of decentralization and local democracy, and a large pool of educated individuals from which to draw staff.

We chose the Eastern Region as this is the area where our epicenter strategy is already well underway, with two epicenters that are now self-reliant and five more poised to build epicenters.

Additional elements of the scale-up demonstration