Exit Plan

As a self-sustainability strategy, many development initiatives come up with an exit plan so that their projects can eventually be fully sustained or even scaled up by either their beneficiary communities or by other organizations, without relying on them anymore.

Several organizations or individuals create development projects which are not necessarily geared towards their own communities, and some of them have realized that since they most likely cannot always be there to sustain their project, if they want to guarantee its self-sustainability in the long term it is crucial for the beneficiaries to take ownership of it and make it relevant to their specific contexts. For this reason, they often decide that the best use of their funds and efforts is building capacity in the communities they work with until the development project is eventually fully under their control, without depending on the team that launched it.

For other initiatives, an exit plan involves creating, refining and testing the effectiveness of development models and eventually handing them over to members of the beneficiary community, or perhaps to another development initiative with greater financial or logistical capacity to sustain them or even scale them up –larger organizations or the State, maybe– for the benefit of either the same or different populations 

Exit plans are therefore a type of preventive measure that many initiatives take to ensure the self-sustainability of their development projects in the long term. But exit plans are implemented in different ways. Sometimes the exit strategy is defined from the get-go, when the project is designed, by establishing timeframes for delegating or decentralizing responsibilities, for instance, and following up on progress and deadlines with annual evaluations. In other cases, the exit plan is implicit in the project itself, as is the case with many disaster relief initiatives that will deal with specific crises; that is why they sometimes strive to build capacity in the communities they are assisting so that these become more resilient in the future. Thus, they not just leave the community after intervening in an emergency but create an exit plan that includes building local capacity to prevent or respond to disasters. 

In some other cases, the exit plan has to do with the type of role each initiative plays in the development of its projects: many incubators or local capacity builders, for instance, endeavor to identify, train and strengthen local leaders, organizations or entrepreneurship programs in order to create the conditions for their own departure, leaving the project under local control. And many initiatives that function as creators of demonstration models create pilot projects or interventions that can be transferred by means of agreements or collaborations after reaching a certain maturity.