Dear Reader,
I am increasingly concerned by how often I hear some version of:
“We will transition to government.”
“Government will take it on.”
“Our pathway to scale is through government.”
With funding increasingly difficult, I understand why. I am a strong believer in scaling solutions rather than endlessly scaling organisations. If you have developed something that works, have evidence of impact and know it is cost effective, surely the ambition should be to solve the problem at population level, not just in the communities you can reach yourself.
Government can be an incredibly powerful route to achieving that.
But scaling through government is sometimes said far too easily.
It is not simply a programme strategy. It has to become an organisational one.
Government is not another distribution channel for your intervention. If government scale is genuinely your strategy, it changes what your organisation does, what capabilities you need, what you measure, how you make decisions and ultimately what you believe your organisation is there to achieve.
Your talent profile changes. Great implementers are not necessarily great government partners.
Your dashboards change. Instead of primarily measuring what you delivered, you increasingly need to understand whether government systems can deliver, whether capability and ownership are shifting, whether financing is becoming sustainable and, critically, whether impact is being maintained.
Your incentives have to change too. If your organisation continues to celebrate how much you delivered while saying the goal is government ownership, you have created competing incentives.
I saw this recently with a client.
We spent a week working through what scaling with government would really require. There were genuine aha moments, shifts in mindset and new plans.
And then everyone went back to work.
The old dashboards remained. The pressure to deliver remained. The things people knew how to measure remained important. The harder work of changing roles, building government capability and thinking systemically struggled to compete with the immediate demands of implementation.
It was a useful lesson for me too.
You cannot workshop your way into scaling through government.
It takes sustained leadership attention and alignment across the organisation, from the board and leadership team to programme teams and funders. And it can take years.
But I think there is an even deeper challenge.
Are you really willing to give up control?
When government increasingly owns delivery, the people responsible for implementation quality are no longer necessarily your employees. They operate within different systems, incentives, priorities and constraints.
You may still have the data, but you don't control whether someone acts on it.
The standards your team fought hard to achieve may not be maintained in exactly the same way.
And your organisation may have to move into the background. Government gets the credit when things work. When they don't, publicly blaming your government partner is unlikely to build the trust needed to fix them.
For organisations used to being accountable for results, that is a profound shift.
But letting go of control does not mean letting go of impact
This is where I think government partnership gets particularly interesting.
You absolutely need to understand the problem from government's perspective. Their priorities. Their language. Their financing. Their constraints.
But partnership cannot mean simply accepting the existing way of doing things.
Government is often partnering with you because you bring something different: evidence, innovation, deep expertise in a particular problem, an intense focus on impact and performance, and sometimes the energy to keep things moving.
So genuine partnership needs give and take. And sometimes healthy, respectful tension built on trust.
The challenge becomes: how do you challenge without taking over?
How do you remain laser focused on impact while building government ownership?
How do you use data to drive better performance when you are no longer the person making the decisions?
How do you help solve problems without becoming the permanent engine room?
That is a very different skill set from running an excellent programme yourself.
Over time, your role may move from doing, to supporting, coaching, enabling and influencing, and eventually stepping back. In some cases, the journey starts differently altogether, with government co designing from day one rather than an organisation building a model independently and later trying to transition it.
What does success actually look like?
I don't think institutionalisation is achieved simply because government has agreed to your model.
Nor because it appears in policy.
Nor even because there is a government budget line for it.
Those things matter enormously. But ultimately, the test is whether the system can continue delivering impact without needing your organisation to be the hero.
That is why I increasingly think real scale is not simply about reaching more people.
It is about creating something that develops momentum beyond you.
And that creates a difficult tension for organisations whose identity, people and funding have been built around being the ones who deliver.
You have to care just as much about the outcome, while becoming progressively less central to delivering it.
So when I hear an organisation say, “Our plan is to scale through government,” the first question I want to ask is no longer just whether government is ready.
Is your organisation genuinely ready for what success will require it to become?
I would love to hear from organisations already on this journey. What has been hardest to let go of, and how have you balanced government ownership with continuing to push for quality and impact?
Warmly,
Liz
Strategic Advisor | Former CEO | Founder, Volante
Based in Kenya, available globally
