4 Minute Read

Elrha’s Failure to Scale paper names a pattern many practitioners recognise: too many promising humanitarian and development innovations stall between pilot and widespread use. CGE contributed practitioner insights from the Cultivator and our work on inclusive innovation and entrepreneurship. Our focus was practical: why good ideas do not take root, and how to build pathways that do.

What we brought to the table. 

Problem-centred pipelines. We argued for pipelines that start with local problem definitions and move through co-creation to locally owned delivery. Ideas developed far from context rarely translate without deep partnership.

Support for the people who scale. Ventures often fail on founder fatigue and thin support systems as much as on product fit. We called for long-horizon accompaniment, peer communities, and embedded in-country partners rather than short, transactional grants.

Funding misalignment. We highlighted how many grants are solution-led rather than challenge-led, administratively heavy, and short-term. They reward outputs over learning and do not buy the time required to adapt solutions to local systems. We urged challenge-centric briefs and stage-appropriate finance.

Risk appetite and early investment. We noted the infancy of social investment for the early stages. Patient, risk-tolerant capital is scarce, which leaves promising teams trapped at the prototype. We proposed blended instruments that combine grants for public-good elements with recoverable or loan finance for operations.

Alternative endgames. We shared practical routes beyond building a single, ever-larger operator: social franchising, open transfer, public–community partnerships, and brand or IP assignments that enable capable local organisations to scale impact.

The wider report. 

The report documents systemic blockers: funding concentrated at prototyping, weak adoption pathways, misaligned incentives, and evidence demands that ignore the real conditions for uptake. It calls for listening to people closest to the crisis, diversifying finance, strengthening adoption routes, improving support services, and coordinating actors around shared pipelines. CGE’s contribution aligns with and helps operationalise these shifts. 

Read the full report here. 

How inclusive innovation and entrepreneurship change the odds.

CGE’s stance is simple: scale should move power closer to the challenge. Inclusive innovation means research and ventures are co-created with the people most affected; different kinds of expertise are respected; solutions fit existing local systems; agency and fair recompense are strengthened; and the result is responsible, context-appropriate, clearly needed, and accessible.

Inclusive entrepreneurship turns these principles into practice. We back in-country ownership from the start; design for multiple endgames such as social franchising and open transfer; and measure what actually enables adoption – service pathways, procurement, maintenance, and behaviour change – rather than only product metrics. Financing follows the same logic: blended, stage-appropriate, and able to fund learning and adaptation, not only outputs. Together, these shifts tackle the specific blockers the report surfaces: contextual blind spots, burnout and fragmentation, inflexible finance, disconnected ecosystems, and the “stalled at pilot” trap.

Invitation. 

If you are a researcher with a promising idea, a funder rethinking instruments, or an implementer seeking scalable, locally led solutions, we would value a conversation. 

To read the full ELHRA Failure to Scale Report, see here.