Developed in civil society, embedded in the public sector, and scaled across the country.
That is the dream scenario for many social-purpose organisations setting out to design innovative welfare solutions.
But the reality is different. Very few make it all the way through the narrow gateway into the public system.
Even organisations that have developed financially viable solutions with documented impact often have to change course or give up when funding runs out without the public sector having taken over the solution.
Scaling through government is simply harder than many imagine.
That is the conclusion of the international organisation Spring Impact in its report Scaling with Government.
“Many organisations want to scale with government, but they often do not have a clear picture of what it actually takes, or whether it is realistic for them at all,” says the report’s lead author, Alice Foster-Metcalf.
The government perspective has been missing
In the new report, Spring Impact, together with Instiglio and LGT Venture Philanthropy, draws on 12 cases in which organisations have either succeeded in scaling with government or made substantial progress towards doing so.
What they have in common is that government does more than simply support the intervention or provide infrastructure. Over time, the public authority must drive and finance the intervention and be accountable for its delivery.
The provider can still be external, but the solution must be embedded in normal public-sector operations rather than remain a separate donor-funded project.
A distinctive feature of the study is that it starts from the needs of government – a perspective that has been largely missing from the existing literature.
In practice, Spring Impact has examined what public authorities themselves value, how they assess risk and value, what creates trust, and what makes them finance and embed a solution within the public system.
The lessons also apply to Denmark
The 12 cases cover areas including health, education, water supply and infrastructure, and come from low- and middle-income countries such as Ghana, India, Kenya, Malawi, Moldova, Nepal, Rwanda and South Africa.
But although the report may at first glance appear primarily relevant to international development organisations, its core conclusions can also be transferred to welfare states such as Denmark and the UK, according to Alice Foster-Metcalf.
“They are about the way public institutions generally work. Risk-averse officials weigh political and reputational risk. Organisations need to understand the political and institutional system, and they need to be willing to adapt their solutions to existing structures,” she says.
There will be differences, but not on the decisive points.
“The road to government ownership is the same, and many of the challenges and dynamics recur across geographies,” says Alice Foster-Metcalf.
A good solution is not enough
The report identifies a misconception that is common among many social entrepreneurs: if we can design an effective and cost-effective welfare solution, government will take it over.
But that equation rarely holds, says Alice Foster-Metcalf. Working with public authorities is about far more than designing good products and services.
“Scaling with government is primarily a question of political and institutional feasibility. It is not just a question of technical evidence,” says Alice Foster-Metcalf.
In other words, a solution can be both well documented and cheaper than the existing intervention and still be impossible for a public authority to adopt.
It may not fit the budget cycle, there may be no lawful procurement route, or it may require staff and workflows that the system does not have.
Organisations therefore need to accept that a large part of what determines their ability to scale lies outside their own control.
Three gates must open at the same time
Spring Impact describes three institutional gates that all need to be open before a solution can realistically be scaled with government.
The political gate
First, the problem must be a genuine political priority.
It is not enough for civil servants to take meetings, attend conferences or express interest. There must be decision-makers with the necessary authority, and there must be a concrete institutional route to action – for example a policy reform, a budget line or new regulation.
The organisation can rarely create that opening on its own. But it can follow political developments, build relationships and be ready when the gate opens.
The financial gate
Second, the public authority must actually be able to pay.
It is not enough to show that the solution is cost-effective. It has to fit the way government budgets and procures.
There must be a lawful financing route, the expenditure must fit within public budgets, and the money has to be available year after year.
Here, the organisation can help by developing budget-ready calculations, adapting the model to the authority’s financial constraints and using co-financing as a bridge towards permanent public funding.
The delivery gate
Third, the public system must be able to deliver the intervention at the required scale.
That means the solution has to fit existing professional roles and workflows. Frontline staff must be able to take on the task, and there must be leadership, supervision, data and clear lines of responsibility.
The three gates are interdependent, Spring Impact emphasises in the report.
A politician may want the solution without there being money for it. The money may be available while the system lacks capacity. Or the authority may have both resources and infrastructure without the issue being a political priority.
If just one gate remains closed, scaling will typically stall.
Stop trying to sell your solution
The institutional conditions are not the only problem. Organisations also make a fundamental strategic mistake, Alice Foster-Metcalf argues.
They focus on getting government to scale their solution. Instead, they should focus on the problem the authority is trying to solve and on how the organisation can help solve it at scale.
“No government is interested in scaling a nonprofit organisation’s solution. That is not its goal,” says Alice Foster-Metcalf.
“The government wants to solve its problems. A nonprofit solution may be one input into that work, but it will never be the end goal in itself.”
That requires the organisation to let go of some of the ownership of its own solution. It must be willing to adapt the method, remove elements, change delivery, or in some cases set the solution itself aside and instead contribute its specialist knowledge.
Put differently, the organisation needs to stop trying to sell a finished product and instead step into the role of a partner that understands the authority’s incentives, finances, decision-making processes and constraints.
Public authorities assess risk before impact
At the same time, it is crucial to understand that public authorities do not see a partnership through the same lens as the organisation.
While the organisation sees the potential for impact, the authority also sees political, financial and reputational risk.
“When governments consider a partnership, their first thought is rarely how much impact the solution can create. They are thinking about how risky the partnership might be,” says Alice Foster-Metcalf.
In the report’s interviews, government officials describe how they may personally be held accountable if an experiment fails.
“It feels as though there is a lot to lose, while it can be difficult for them to see what there is to gain,” says Alice Foster-Metcalf.
Put another way, people are rarely punished for continuing as before. But they can be punished for trying something new that fails.
The organisations that made the most progress managed to position themselves as a safe choice. They knew the formal decision-making processes, respected the authority’s responsibilities and understood the constraints under which civil servants and politicians were operating.
That includes treating the public authority as a capable partner – not as a system that needs to be rescued from its own inadequacy.
Organisations need to understand their customers
Spring Impact’s advice is therefore that organisations begin by understanding the public system they want to work in.
They need to ask:
What problems does the specific authority experience?
What political and financial constraints is it working under?
Who can make the decisive decisions?
Which budgets, rules and workflows must the solution fit into?
Are there people inside the system who both understand the intervention and can build broader support?
Like commercial companies, social entrepreneurs should invest effort in understanding their customers, Alice Foster-Metcalf stresses.
“If government is your customer, it is probably the customer you understand least. Nonprofit organisations are usually good at understanding their target group and their funders. But they often have far less experience of working with government,” she says.
Building the necessary relationships takes time, Alice Foster-Metcalf points out. In the cases examined, organisations spent an average of two to three years understanding the system, building relationships and creating the conditions needed for scaling.
The organisations that made the most progress also spent time identifying internal champions in government – people who came to understand their work in depth and then helped build trust in the organisation elsewhere in the authority.
Some organisations should not do it
Working with government is an effective route to large-scale impact. But it is also a demanding route. Alice Foster-Metcalf therefore advises organisations to take a hard look at themselves before embarking on the path to government scaling.
It is a choice that comes with costs. Organisations that pursue scaling through government may, according to Alice Foster-Metcalf, need to slow the growth of their own delivery and instead use resources to understand the system and build relationships.
“Organisations need to invest time and resources early on in assessing whether the institutional conditions are actually in place. Otherwise, the worst-case scenario is that you keep pursuing a strategy of scaling with government and only five years later discover that it never really had legs,” says Alice Foster-Metcalf.
For some, it will therefore be better to let go of the ambition to build their solution into public services. But that is not the same as lowering their ambitions, she stresses.
“There are many other ways to create impact at scale without scaling through government. This is not a message about being less ambitious or giving up the ambition to create impact at scale.”
Depending on the intervention, the organisation may, for example, seek to scale through the market, influence legislation and practice, or work towards broader systems change without having its own model adopted.
The goal, in other words, is to scale the impact – not necessarily the organisation or its original solution.
If scaling through government does turn out to be the right route, a new question arises: how do you finance the time it takes to build understanding and relationships?
Funders need to finance the invisible work
This requires a new approach from foundations and other funders.
They often get stuck in the same misconception as the organisations themselves: that government is, as a starting point, interested in taking over solutions developed by social entrepreneurs.
“For many funders, the dream scenario is that they finance an organisation until its solution creates impact at scale – and that they then no longer need to fund it because the solution has become embedded in the public system,” says Alice Foster-Metcalf.
But that is rarely how it works, the report shows.
“Funders need to understand that capital is required for organisations to build the necessary understanding of the system and the necessary relationships – even when progress cannot be measured through the usual milestones and outcomes,” says Alice Foster-Metcalf.
She points out that this is not a linear process, and that much of the critical work takes place precisely in the early stages, when the outcome is still uncertain.
Funders therefore need to accept that an organisation is not finished simply because it has developed an effective and cost-effective welfare solution. They also need to help finance the relationship-building and systems work required to make public-sector embedding possible.
Funders need to stay the course
Crucially, funders also need to abandon the idea that their funding can stop the moment government takes responsibility.
Even in the report’s most advanced cases, the organisations continued to play an important role. They helped public authorities troubleshoot problems, learn from implementation and adapt the intervention.
This transition can last between one and five years, Alice Foster-Metcalf estimates.
“If the goal is the very large-scale impact that government scaling can create, funding cannot necessarily stop as soon as the public authority starts paying or taking ownership,” she says.
Government needs to be clearer – and braver
The report is primarily about what organisations and funders need to do differently. But public authorities also have a responsibility, Alice Foster-Metcalf points out.
First and foremost, they need to be more open to the knowledge, experience and capacity for action that exists in civil society.
“Governments need to be open to what is possible in partnerships with civil society. There is an enormous amount of skills, expertise and knowledge in the nonprofit sector that the public sector could become much better at harnessing,” she says.
One way of doing that is to learn from public authorities that already have experience of successful partnerships.
But openness needs to work both ways. Public authorities should also be more open about their own constraints and the barriers standing in the way of collaboration.
“Governments need to be open about the barriers they face when assessing whether a partnership is worth pursuing. Because sometimes organisations can actually help solve some of them,” says Alice Foster-Metcalf.
Public authorities should also say a clear no when there is no realistic opportunity.
Organisations can spend years interpreting friendly meetings and interest from individual civil servants as signs of institutional commitment. A clear no can therefore be more valuable than a non-committal maybe.
Finally, government needs to recognise that the status quo also carries risk.
A public authority may reduce its immediate reputational risk by continuing as before. But at the same time, it risks missing solutions that could produce substantially better outcomes for citizens.
“Risk will always weigh heavily for governments. But I would like to see them give the potential impact of the solution as much weight as the risk,” says Alice Foster-Metcalf.
From project to institutional change
Scaling with government is a slow process that no organisation can control on its own.
But when it works, the impact can be enormous.
In Nepal, a partnership between the government, Helvetas and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation has led to the construction of more than 11,000 trail bridges, benefiting around 17 million people. Since 2023, the authorities themselves have financed and run the national programme.
In India, a mobile health service developed together with BBC Media Action has been scaled to 30 states and reaches tens of millions of mothers.
The crucial question, then, is not how organisations can persuade government to take over their solution, but how they can contribute to solving the problems that matter to government – and how funders can finance the long journey from promising project to public-sector embedding.
