With shrinking aid budgets around the world, oftentimes pilot interventions are funded for relatively short periods of time and need to prove their effectiveness with national governments in the hope of being adopted and taken to scale locally, regionally or even nationally. This paper published in the International Journal of Health Policy and Management, based on a qualitative study in Ethiopia, India and northeast Nigeria, connects literature on scaling up health innovations with six key principles of aid effectiveness. The analysis reveals that actions by donors, implementers and recipient governments to promote the scale-up of innovations strongly reflected many of the principles. If these were better put into practice the prospects for scaling-up innovations would be enhanced.

A subsequent commentary published in the International Journal of Health Policy and Management further explores one of the key principles of aid effectiveness – country ownership, raised by this paper.