What is the Quick-Start Guide and Why and How to Use It
Any potential user of this resource may wonder “what exactly is a Quick Start Guide to the Adaptation and Scale Up of Programmes and why is it important to Joining Forces”? To start with the second part of that question, Joining Forces was conceived of as an initiative to foster collaboration among these six child focused non-governmental agencies working globally in the area of ending violence against children; promoting children’s rights and child participation. This collaboration has committed to broaden and deepen progress in the protection of children by creating inter-agency synergies, sharing human and intellectual resources, strengthening children’s voice, and advancing the ability to speak to funding agencies and governments with greater clarity of purpose and focus. Joining Forces also holds out the potential for better coordination in scaling up evidence-based practices in the area and the adaptation practices needed to make such scale-up context-sensitive and, ultimately, more sustainable.
In terms of how the Quick-Start Guide is intended to be used, it divides the nine tools into three phases that are roughly chronological in their order of use. The first set of tools focuses on selecting an intervention or activity that the local Joining Forces team thinks is a successful candidate for scale up (tools #1, #2, #3, and #4). The second set of tools support the development and tracking of a scale-up strategy (tools #5, #6 and #7) and the final section offers a single tool (#9) that offers a means of documenting and disseminating lessons learned.
But while this rough order of tool use is provided, if there is an overarching principle all users should follow in using this guide is: DO WHAT WORKS FOR YOUR TEAM IN YOUR CONTEXT. For instance almost all of the tools require some prior collection of information, but in some cases the team may decide to use readily available information and in other cases it may choose to do extensive research to gather the information.
Teams may also choose to substitute the tool provided in the guide for another tool with which they are more familiar and comfortable. Your team may question whether you need to use some of the tools. For those tools that the team does choose to use, you may find that some of them may be used very quickly (for instance, just to make sure the team is thinking of all the relevant adaptation and scale issues raised). On the other hand, your team may decide that it is worthwhile to use a tool—and discuss the outputs from the tool—in a very thorough way. In short, all the tools in the quick-start guide are only intended to suggest the kinds of data that should inform choices in adaptation and scale and highlight topics that a local Joining Forces team will want to consider. In the end, the local Joining Forces team is in the best position to decide if a tool should be used and how it should be used.
We hope that this guide will be useful to staff throughout Joining Forces’ member agencies by ensuring that key principles in adaptation and scale are understood and made practical. As a “quick-start” guide, this resource and the tools it contains are not intended to provide a comprehensive set of one-size-fits-all answers — as we know, the process of scale-up will (must) look different in every context depending on innumerable variables. Instead, every tool is designed to pose critical questions and support local Joining Forces experts as they approach key and critical junctures in the scaling process.