Creator of Demonstration Models

Many development initiatives become more self-sustainable by defining what the appropriate role for their project is –that is, what role would best enable them to meet objectives while leveraging resources, time and effort. One of their options is becoming a creator of demonstration models.

The role that an initiative adopts to address its target problem has very important effects on the way projects are designed, resources managed and allocated, and self-sustainability fostered. For this reason, several initiatives carefully consider and decide what they want to do with the problem they are tackling. Some projects choose to lay the groundwork for eradicating the problem in the future; others prefer to grow and become major service providers; and still others aim to support development initiatives that share their cause in order to maximize their own and their partners’ impact. 

Initiatives that choose to act as creators of demonstration models have decided that their efforts and resources are best spent designing, testing and adapting specific proposals to solve development problems. These initiatives then go on to demonstrate their proposals’ effectiveness and collaborate with actors with more capacity to scale or replicate them in other places or for the benefit of different populations. In this way, their programs can become relevant to more and more people without having to scale them up themselves. Their efforts and resources can then be optimized by redirecting them to new development solutions.

Some creators of demonstration models use pilot projects to test out and refine their small-scale interventions, identifying and removing the various obstacles that may arise before replicating or scaling them up. Others do not use pilot projects, but when they see clear signs that their intervention is working, they redirect their efforts to transfer the program to initiatives with more resources or capacity to sustain it –the State or larger organizations, for instance– and, in some cases, also prepare the beneficiary communities to take on stewardship of it when their initiative withdraws. Other projects systematize their model to see if it would work and could be replicated in contexts similar to their own, and then offer talks, courses or consultancies to other initiatives interested in reaching new populations (which can also yield a profit).