Draft 0.1, 29 September 2026. Visible to administrators only, for review before publication.

Module 7: Sustainability, monitoring and scaling up

Reading time about 30 minutes, workshop 60 to 90 minutes. For club and district Rotarians who run or supervise a recovery project, and the local partners who will carry it after Rotary steps back.

What you will be able to do

• Test whether a recovery project will survive the end of its funding, using four simple questions.
• Plan the exit of the funder from the start, and organize a progressive withdrawal.
• Choose a small set of indicators, measure a baseline, and report to the Foundation, partners, donors and the community.
• Run a debriefing that produces decisions, and keep the lessons alive despite yearly changes of club leadership.
• Decide whether a project should be scaled up, handed over, or kept as it is, and connect recovery to long-term economic development.

Why it matters

RAGCED's mandate after a disaster is to relaunch the local economy. A recovery project that stops the day the money stops has not relaunched anything: it has delayed the problem. The test of economic recovery is what is still working years later, run by local people, without Rotary. This module closes the cycle of the programme. It shows how a project becomes durable, how a club learns from it, and how recovery flows back into the normal work of community economic development: before the disaster, prepare; after it, relaunch; and always, develop.

Participants' suggestions collected on sticky notes to set community recovery priorities (Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA, January 2006). Photo: FEMA / Robert Kaufmann, public domain

A farmer checks tree seedlings on a farm seven months after Hurricane Michael (Fort Valley, Georgia, USA, 7 May 2019). Photo: USDA / Lance Cheung, public domain

1. What makes a recovery project last

Rotary gives a short definition. Sustainability is "the ability to operate a project or program on its own without support from Rotary". Rotary brochures do not list formal sustainability criteria beyond this definition; Rotary refers clubs to its guide Six Steps to Sustainability. What follows are principles drawn from field practice, not official Foundation criteria.

Local ownership. The people who benefit must want the project, shape it and feel it is theirs. Ask who owns the project: the Rotarians, or the people who live with it every day? If the answer is the Rotarians, it will stop when they leave.

Skills transfer. Train people who stay: trainers, facilitators, cooperative managers, repair technicians. Former beneficiaries who succeed can become mentors to the next ones.

A business model. Something must pay the running costs after the grant: fees paid by users, margins of a cooperative, interest earned by a savings group or a microfinance institution, a municipal budget. Be honest about the limit: a purely social activity cannot fully finance itself. It needs a permanent institution to carry it.

The funder's exit. Rotary's money is a start, not a salary. Plan from day one who takes over.

Four questions to ask at the design stage, check halfway, and settle before closure:

1. Who operates it? Which organization carries the activity after the grant?
2. Who pays? Where do the running costs come from?
3. Who maintains? Who repairs and replaces equipment? Buy locally what must be repaired locally.
4. Who measures and adjusts? Who keeps watching the results?

Four routes answer these questions, and the strongest projects combine two or three of them:

Route	Example
Own revenue	Traders' fees keep a market running
Partner institution	A savings group joins a microfinance network
Public policy	The municipality takes over a training center
Knowledge transfer	Trained facilitators start new groups

After a disaster, one more rule applies: do not compete with the local economy you are trying to relaunch. Free distributions were right during the emergency; in recovery, they can ruin the shops and farmers who are trying to restart. Shift from distribution to restoring the local market, and buy from local suppliers.

Plan the exit from the start

The exit is not an event at the end, it is a process. Field experience in agricultural programs shows that a progressive withdrawal of support works better than a sudden stop: fewer meetings, then lighter visits, then occasional contact, so that groups do not feel abandoned. Write this withdrawal into the project plan, with dates and names.

Budget the follow-up. A member of RAGCED put it plainly: post-project follow-up should be part of the project and included in the budget.

2. Monitoring: measure little, measure well

Monitoring serves the project first, and reporting second. Its purpose is to help decisions, inform partners, account for the money and keep the lessons.

Start with a baseline. You cannot show improvement if you do not know the starting point. Before activities begin, record the situation: incomes, businesses open, jobs, access to credit, harvests. After a disaster, the baseline is the situation after the shock, and it is also worth recording what people remember of the situation before.

Keep indicators few. One field guide sets a clear rule: in many cases, about a dozen indicators is a maximum not to exceed. Every piece of data collected should have a practical use. Collecting data that nobody uses wastes the time of volunteers and discourages the community.

Make each indicator precise. How many? What? Who? Where? By when?

Simple indicators for economic recovery:

• number of businesses reopened, and still operating after one year;
• jobs created or recovered;
• average income of beneficiary households, compared with the baseline;
• loans repaid on time, for a microfinance component;
• savings groups still meeting without outside support;
• people trained who actually use their new skills.

Claim contribution, not attribution. Many things change after a disaster at the same time: public aid, remittances, other NGOs. Say honestly what your project contributed to, rather than claiming every improvement.

Document and report

Keep a simple, solid record system: a separate account for the project, a receipt for every expense, a register of beneficiaries, photos with captions, minutes of key meetings. Treat personal data of beneficiaries with care: collect only what you need, and ask consent for photos and testimonies.

Report to four audiences:

• The Rotary Foundation. A Global Grant requires progress reports and a final report. Check their timing and content in the current Terms and Conditions of The Rotary Foundation, with your district Rotary Foundation committee chair. A late report can block grants for the whole district.
• Partners and donors. Regular, short updates on how the money was used and what changed, even when "nothing new" happened.
• The community. Share the results with the people who gave the data. It is both a courtesy and a check on your figures.
• The Rotary world. Publish the project on Rotary's Service Project Center, so that other clubs can learn from it.

3. Debrief and learn

The Foundation's staff has acknowledged that it does not yet have a system to draw lessons from final reports. If the club does not learn from its project, nobody will.

Debrief at three moments: briefly after each key step, at least twice a year during the project in a "pause and reflect" session, and at the end. Do not wait months: memories fade quickly.

A debriefing in seven questions, adapted from the Disaster Field Guide:

1. What worked well?
2. What did not work?
3. What resources were missing?
4. What would we do differently?
5. Was the plan followed, and was it the right plan?
6. Did communication work, inside the club, with the district, with partners and beneficiaries?
7. Did the partnerships work?

Rules that make it useful:

• facts and lessons, no blame;
• a facilitator from outside the project, such as a member of a neighboring club or the district;
• everyone speaks, not only the leaders;
• every problem leads to a corrective action with an owner and a deadline. Without them, actions drift.

Share the lessons, including failures. Some projects will fail: a cooperative collapses, a partner weakens, an external shock hits, a key leader leaves. A club that says "we made this mistake, here is how to avoid it" gives the most valuable gift to other clubs. Send your lessons to the district, to DNA-RAG and to RAGCED.

Protect the memory. Club presidents change every year; a recovery project lasts longer. Keep one project file that passes from president to president, and keep the same project lead for the whole life of the project.

4. Scaling up: when, how, and to whom

Rotary defines scaling up as "the process of enhancing the coverage, impact, and sustainability of a project". Scaling up does not only mean doing the same thing elsewhere. It can also mean going deeper in the same community, or getting a public institution to adopt what works.

Three lessons from practitioners of scaling up:

• Scale is too often an afterthought. Think about it at the design stage: what could happen after the project, here or elsewhere, and who would carry it?
• Few organizations can carry a service at scale for the long term. With few exceptions, the platforms able to deliver services durably at scale are governments and markets, or a combination of the two. The realistic role of a Rotary club is usually to prove that something works, then hand it over.
• Not every project should be replicated. A project built to make one specific community self-sufficient has done its job when that community stands on its own.

Three ways to scale, depending on who keeps control:

• Expansion: the same organization grows. It is the natural reflex of a club, and the hardest to sustain.
• Replication: other clubs, organizations or authorities adopt the model, usually with changes.
• Collaboration: partnerships and networks carry the model together.

Before scaling, check three things: the results are measured and credible, the model can be transferred without its founders, and someone is ready to carry and fund it. Then grow only as fast as trained people allow. In every program that scales, the limit is the number of well-trained facilitators, not the budget. Growth that outruns training destroys quality.

The Rotary Foundation also has mechanisms that support larger or longer programs. Their conditions change: check the current Terms and Conditions and ask your DRFC before planning around them.

From recovery back to development

Recovery is not a separate world. The capacities that help a local economy recover after a disaster are the same ones that ordinary economic development builds in calm times: local businesses that know each other, working relations with lenders, trained people, a plan. A recovery project that lasts becomes a development project. And a development project that builds savings, skills and diversified income is also the best preparation for the next disaster.

This is how the programme loops: Modules 1 to 3 prepare the community, Modules 4 to 6 relaunch its economy after the shock, and this module brings recovery back to community economic development, the permanent work of RAGCED.

Go further

• Guillaume Bourgogne, Rotary Club Guide, Autonomous Disaster Response: The Operational Framework: Chapter 24, Document and report; Chapter 25, Debrief and improve.
• Guillaume Bourgogne, Community Economic Development guide for Rotary clubs (forthcoming), Part V, After: sustainability and scale: From project to sustainability; Document and report; Debrief and improve; Scaling up.
• Rotary International, Economic and Community Development Project Strategies, and Six Steps to Sustainability.
• The Rotary Foundation, Terms and Conditions for District Grants and Global Grants, on my.rotary.org.
• Rotary Service Project Center: spc.rotary.org.
• Scaling Up, From Vision to Large-Scale Change: A Management Framework for Practitioners, MSI toolkit, 2021.
• Disaster Field Guide: https://disasterfieldguide.org/

After running this module in your club, please send your feedback (a pre-filled email), or fill in the feedback sheet in the workshop sheets and send a photo of it. It helps RAGCED improve the programme.

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