Sustainability: Conceptual Frameworks, evaluating progress and exemplars of it all in action

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Education development activities in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) feature an inherent contradiction: projects are often expected to achieve sustainability while much of our conceptual framing focuses on scalability. Both concepts are critical: sustainability articulates our desire for sustained outcomes while scalability captures how we get there. This panel is based on the premise that with appropriate classification of the intentions for a particular project, project design and implementation is improved. We present a classification structure that clarifies the relationship between sustainability and scalability, how progress in sustainability can be measured, and how this structure can help bring clarity to project designs, implementation and evaluations; forge linkages across funders and subsequent projects in the same population, and ensure long-term outcomes are built on iterative progress.

The term sustainability has been used in different ways in the international development sector, including, as a substitute for the term scalability. Much of the framing in literature regarding sustainability in fact speaks to scalability and borrows heavily from the health sector: maintaining services over time (Eleanor Crook Foundation, 2022), adaptation at the end of a project (Chambers, 2013) , steps to pilot, test and scale interventions (Barker, 2016), or an institutional development framework required for successful scaling (MSI, 2018), among others. More recently, publications by Brookings and MSI have brought the concept of scalability closer to home and specifically applied to education: the Millions Learning report (Brookings, 2018) tells the story of how education interventions have scaled in low- and middle-income countries and MSI’s Scaling-up Toolkit (2018) and the associated Management Framework for Practitioners (2016) articulate the steps to achieve scale of an education intervention.

As these definitions and publications illustrate, the concept of scalability is fiercely related to sustainability – they both evoke intentions of improving social outcomes over longer timescales and expansion of successful activities to more people. However, the overlapping nature of these two concepts demands clarity of terminology: at what level does sustainability operate, how do we understand the nexus of the two, and how can this clarification in turn illuminate our way forward?

This panel proposes the following principles:
1. Sustainability is the overarching outcome consisting of five goals. The fifth and most ambitious goal is scaling. Goals articulate the intended results of a specific project.
2. Explicitly identifying the sustainability goal for an initiative allows fit-for-purposes design decisions in place of looming, unspoken expectations of scaling in all cases. Decisions regarding design, evaluation questions, indicators, value for money/cost analyses questions, among others.
3. Initiatives are bigger than a project: an initiative is the work, the project is the vehicle for delivering activities under that initiative in a specific timeframe and budget. The distinction makes space for local (versus colonialist) perspectives.
4. Sustainability applies to initiatives; goals (including scale) apply to projects.
5. Multiple projects are needed to achieve an initiative’s desired sustainability outcomes.

The panel includes 4 presentations. The first presentation will describe the sustainability framework and its five goals of increasing ambition - including scaling - and discuss the broader policy and funding context in which such a framework can add value. The second presentation will share sustainability indicators and results from GEC projects, funded by the FCDO, across the last year. The third presentation will demonstrate how this conceptual framework can be applied meaningfully to work across the sector by any implementer and donor: it helps locate the purpose and design of projects and their bespoke interventions in the broader sustainability goals. The fourth presentation will provide an example of a multi-project initiative that exemplifies the iteratively ambitious goals of scaling, in practice. Altogether, the panel seeks to push the sustainability (and scalability) conversations forward by making space for the critical local education voices that rightfully must lead these conversations. The panel will conclude with audience discussion to invite criticisms, alternative frameworks and next steps.

Sub Unit

• Monitoring and Evaluation SIG

Chair

• Sharon Tao, Girls' Education Challenge

Individual Presentations

• Conceptual Framework for Sustainability - Hetal Thukral, DDI Center for Education, United States Agency for International Development (USAID)

• Sustainability outcomes on the GEC - Marie-Louise Hoilund-Carlsen

• Sustaining Measurable Impact for Youth Through Systems Change - Boris Bulayev, Educate!