Scale & Sustain

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Context Tool: Scaling Solutions

A tool to help you to measure how far your idea could scale.

Jordan has the highest number of deaf students in the region. There are only 10 public schools for deaf children, which are distributed unequally around the country. 80% of deaf children are illiterate. Many parents struggle to communicate with their children, as they don’t have access to resources for formal Arabic sign language. Often, they invent their own form of sign language, leaving children unable to communicate with other people, including other hearing impaired people.

After having developed their solution, the team behind Martha worked with this diagram to understand how their solution could be scaled. For example, this solution could also be adapted by teachers.


  1. Have your idea or solution with identified stakeholders, context, and goal.
  2. Write or draw your solution on a sticky note or a piece of paper (use the idea share out tool if you need help!)
  3. Map out how it would solve the challenge throughout different contexts.

This tool helped us scale our solution to multiple target segments, explore who else might need it or be interested in it, and think of ways to make it useful for people who may be different from our main users.

Ehab

Related Tools

Idea Share Out

A template that helps in articulating your solution by adding a name, a description and a sketch to your idea. You can come up with more than one. It's a useful tool to be used either to get feedback from stakeholders or to organize your thoughts before presenting your final solution

Storytelling Scaling Story

A template to help you explain your innovation, plan for the future of the project, and convince others to support your innovation (adapted from the Response Innovation Lab).