Description of Session
In the last 5 years, ministries, donors, and implementers have united behind a rallying cry: To move digital development beyond “pilotitis” into proven, sustained impact at scale. Seeds of success towards this goal have begun to sprout, as technology products have leveraged shared investment to produce mature platforms now reaching hundreds of thousands of active users. But flourishing above the ground requires more work after emerging from the soil. Scale-proven Open Source Global Goods have managed on multiple occasions to deploy national scale programs only to find those successes celebrated as a reason to cease additional investment, just as they reach the point where incremental improvements pay off by 10-100x in improving long term success. Without drastic changes in how digital development approaches technology funding, we should expect the theme of GDHF 2024 to be lessons learned from when scale failed. In this session, makers of DHIS2, CommCare, and ODK will present the challenges that we’ve experienced scaling and handing off programs. This includes CommCare taking the largest digital health system in the world from 115,000 users in 2018 to 350,000 users in 2019, and ODK tripling their user base over the last two years to 2.5M users with active users in every country. We will outline the hidden multiplicative costs associated with scaling programs while expanding their scope, and the consequences of pairing those efforts in funding. We will describe the obstacles we’ve encountered across these programs from gaps in Digital Development’s “implement, institutionalize, impart” theory of change, and how shifts in donor expectations along with changes to the principles for approaching development can better prepare technology programs for long term success and autonomy. Finally, we will offer example models from the Open Source world outside of development, and propose mechanisms to better align future success.
