Impact at Scale: Why Growth Isn’t Always the Answer

Last year, I came across an insightful post from Spring Impact that discussed the difference between scale and growth, and why this distinction matters for organizations aiming to maximize their impact.

In short, here’s the key takeaway: Scale refers to increasing the actual impact an organization has in solving social problems and improving people’s lives. Growth, on the other hand, focuses on expanding an organization’s resources – such as budget, staff, or user base – or increasing uptake of a particular solution. However, prioritizing growth alone may not always be the most effective strategy for achieving impact at scale.

This resonates deeply with me because it closely aligns with how Precision Development (PxD) views the world and our role in it. PxD is a global non-profit with a mission to scale innovations that millions of farmers can use to improve their lives. For us, impact at scale is our guiding principle.

Since 2016, PxD has rapidly scaled digital agriculture services and other high-impact innovations, reaching over 18.5 million farmers in Africa and Asia in 2024. We’ve achieved this not by focusing on our own growth as an organization, but by prioritizing four key principles that will continue to drive exponential impact at scale long after PxD’s work is done.

First, we partner with doers at scale – governments and other implementing organizations – to help them deliver innovations in a sustainable and cost-effective way. PxD builds and scales innovations to address the complex, interconnected challenges of rural poverty, food security, and climate resilience. However, we don’t typically provide these innovations directly to farmers indefinitely. Almost half of our scale comes from PxD’s “Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT)” model, where we work with government partners to design and build locally-embedded digital agriculture services. We operate these services for a time before transitioning them over to our government partners, ensuring sustainable, long-term service delivery at scale.

Services developed through the BOT model now reach more than 7 million farmers in India and Pakistan, with local governments managing and financing them sustainably. These farmers are what we call “graduated users” – they continue benefiting from PxD’s services without our direct involvement or any philanthropic funding.

Similarly, PxD works with governments and other organizations that already have their own innovative services, helping to make them even more effective for farmers. For example, since 2017, we’ve partnered with governments like the Ethiopian Agricultural Transformation Institute (ATI) and non-profits and social enterprises like One Acre Fund to improve their digital agriculture services. We do this by embedding research, conducting A/B testing, improving user experience, incorporating new information, and scaling real-time information to farmers. Through these partnerships, we’ve reached an additional 1.6 million farmers who continue to benefit even after PxD’s work is done. 

Second, we work ourselves out of a job. While this phrase has become a buzzword in global development, we truly stand by it. We’ve proven our commitment by transferring large-scale programs to governments, even when it meant closing significant PxD offices and reducing our staff. As Spring Impact puts it: “Scaling your impact might require your organization to grow. But it might not.”

Between 2016 and 2022, PxD grew its annual budget from $1 million to $8 million as we aggressively scaled existing programs and launched new ones. However, in 2022 we transitioned our flagship digital agriculture program, Ama Krushi, to the Odisha state Department of Agriculture and Farmers’ Empowerment (DAFE). This program has continued to scale since the transition, growing from 3 million farmers at the time of transition in 2022 to 7 million farmers in 2024. We also transitioned similar programs to the state government of West Bengal, India in 2022, and to the provincial government of Punjab, Pakistan in 2023.

As a result, PxD closed offices in Odisha, West Bengal, and Punjab, our budget shrank from $8 million in 2022 to under $5 million in 2023, the number of “current users” that we directly reach ourselves dropped from 5.6 million in 2022 to 2.6 million in 2023, and our headcount contracted from more than 100 staff to 50 – several of whom were absorbed by our government partners. We don’t see this as a  setback but as an essential part of the program development cycle: we create new, innovative services, mature them at scale, and then hand them over to partners who can continue to deliver them effectively in the long-term. This approach has allowed PxD to focus on developing new innovative products and services, and launching new programs in new geographies in 2023 and 2024. 

Third, we are solution-agnostic. While our primary innovation has been building digital agriculture services that provide farmers with real-time information via their mobile phones, these services are not a one-size-fits-all solution. Instead, they encompass a wide range of solutions offering different types of information through various digital channels, each customized to the specific challenges faced by farmers in different geographies, agro-ecological zones, and crop or livestock value chains.

Moreover, PxD does not focus solely on digital agriculture. Our guiding principle is to prioritize  solutions that can reach large numbers of people at very low (or even zero) marginal cost per additional user. Digital technology is particularly effective in this regard because it benefits from enormous economies of scale. Once the initial fixed costs of setting up digital services are covered, the marginal cost of delivering these services to additional users is nearly zero. These economies of scale have allowed us to exponentially increase our impact, growing from less than 30,000 farmers in 2016 to over 18.5 million farmers in 2024, with only incremental increases in resources. As a result, our cost per user has dropped sharply, from over $40 per year in 2016 to under $1 in 2024 (see figure below).

However, while we believe in the high impact and cost-effectiveness of digital agriculture, it is  just one tool in our toolkit for addressing rural poverty, food insecurity, and climate change. As Spring Impact puts it: “It’s about falling in love with the problem and holding our solutions lightly.” That’s why we are  also investing in a variety of innovative products and services to improve farmers’ lives – some of which use digital technology, and some of which do not. These include improved weather forecasts to help farmers reduce climate risks; asset-collateralized loans (ACLs) for financing agricultural assets; access to stress-tolerant seeds to protect against pests, disease, and climate-related shocks; and connecting farmers with new climate mitigation technologies like leaf color charts (LCCs) and enhanced rock weathering (ERW) to promote environmentally sustainable farming practices. 

All of these innovations are supported by rigorous evidence of impact, ensuring that our focus  remains on achieving deep, meaningful change in people’s lives, rather than simply reaching large numbers of people quickly. Furthermore, through our work in India and Ethiopia, we are expanding our mandate to assist governments in improving a broad range of agricultural programs. These include both digital solutions, such as unique farmer ID systems and access to digital insurance and credit, and non-digital solutions like India’s $1.3 billion Pradhan Mantri Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana (PM-RKVY) scheme, which funds state governments to implement projects designed to enhance agricultural productivity and farmers’ income. 

Lastly, we aim to make our work scalable, not just replicable. Inspired by a thought-provoking article from the Skoll Foundation, that means going beyond simply replicating our digital agricultural services from one geography to another (with variations as needed). Instead, we focus on building the capacity of our partners to take over and scale the work independently. Similar to how digital technology allows us to scale impact within each program non-linearly (with less effort and cost per additional user), our strategic partnerships enable us to scale our impact disproportionately across programs as well.

In 2024, PxD launched a new “government advisory” service model. This model provides governments with strategic advice on how to optimize and scale their nationwide portfolios of digital agriculture solutions. We help them design these solutions using evidence, and build the foundational digital ecosystems and enabling environments needed to support them. For example, PxD established a Project Management Unit (PMU) within the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare (MoA&FW) in India, and we’re supporting the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) in Ethiopia with implementation of its Digital Agriculture Roadmap. This new service model is already delivering indirect benefits to millions more farmers at a very low cost, leveraging the vast scale of government investments to achieve far greater impact than what we could do alone.

As we move into 2025, we are excited about the new opportunities to continue scaling our impact by partnering with doers at scale, working ourselves out of a job to ensure lasting impact, creating innovative solutions to improve lives, and building our partners’ capacity to continue this work independently.

Founded in 2016 with the bold goal of improving the lives of 100 million people, PxD still has a long way to go to reach that target. But we’re confident we can get there – not by growing our organization, but by scaling our impact through partnerships, capacity building, and innovation.