Reimagining Development: From Projects to Sustainable Impact
by David Lloyd-Lewis, Co-founder & Chief Product Officer
The global development sector is at a crossroads. In From Crisis to Sustainable Impact at Scale: Rethinking Global Development, Brookings highlights the pressures facing traditional aid models: constrained funding, multiplying crises, and fragile trust between donors, governments, and communities.
Yet within this challenge lies a profound opportunity: to rethink not only what gets scaled, but how. Scaling can no longer mean simply replicating projects or increasing budgets. It must mean embedding sustainability from the outset, aligning with local systems, and creating change that lasts long after external actors step back.
Why Stories Belong in the Scaling Debate
One insight often overlooked in conversations about “scaling” is the role of voice. Development is not just about institutions, capital flows, or technical models. It’s about how people experience change, what they value, and what barriers they face.
Authentic storytelling offers:
Evidence that explains the “why” behind the numbers: why an initiative takes root in one community but not another.
Signals for adaptation: lived experience can surface early warnings and highlight unintended consequences.
Trust and legitimacy: when people see their own voices reflected in decision-making, the pathway to durable impact becomes clearer.
Scaling that listens creates pathways to what truly matters.
Designing for Sustainability, Not Just Scale
Transformative projects don’t succeed by simply getting bigger. They succeed when sustainable systems are embedded from the start: policies, institutions, value chains, financing, and long-term partnerships.
Sustainability is social. It depends on relationships, cultural relevance, and a sense of local ownership. Community-led storytelling can be a mechanism for sustaining engagement: it creates feedback loops, fosters accountability, and embeds a sense of shared purpose across time.
Better Monitoring, Evaluation, Learning, and Accountability
Scaling isn’t only about design and delivery. It’s also about how we learn. Brookings highlights the need for stronger monitoring, evaluation, learning, and accountability systems that extend beyond short project cycles.
Storytelling plays a vital role here. Stories help explain why outcomes occur, not just whether they do. They capture unintended consequences, surface lived experience, and provide adaptive signals that quantitative metrics alone cannot. When stories are systematically gathered and analyzed, they create a continuous learning loop that keeps communities, implementers, and funders aligned over time.
Aligning Funding and Donor Expectations
Another critical challenge is how donors define and measure success. Reporting is frequently shaped around compliance, outputs, and short-term deliverables. If development is to achieve sustainable impact at scale, funding practices and expectations must evolve.
Real success lies beyond outputs. It depends on embedding systems that endure, including policies, institutions, value chains, financing, and long-term partnerships. These systems thrive when they are also socially grounded, built on relationships, cultural relevance, and local ownership.
This shift helps move the culture of reporting from compliance to learning, and from outputs to outcomes that matter most to people on the ground.
Toward a More Human Approach to Scaling
Calls for more sustainable, inclusive, and accountable development are not new but they are becoming urgent. Achieving them means placing communities not at the periphery but at the center of global development systems.
Listening to lived experience is central to designing solutions that last. It is crucially the foundation for approaches that scale sustainably, build legitimacy, and respond to the complexity of human lives. The opportunity before us is not only to rethink how we fund or deliver development.
What if rethinking development meant transforming how we learn, adapt, and share responsibility for impact?