Using rubrics to explore pathways to scale: Navigating the Integration of Graduation into Public Systems

In this blog, Arnaldo Pellini, Kristian Paolo Torres, and Tania Dora Warokka reflect on their experience developing and testing a rubric to support dialogue and learning as complex initiatives are integrated into public systems. Drawing on work with government partners in Indonesia and the Philippines, they explore how rubrics can help structure qualitative judgements, surface leverage points, and navigate pathways to scale in evolving, non-linear contexts.

Scaling complex approaches through government systems often involves working without a clear blueprint. Strategies evolve over time, contexts differ across and within countries, and much of what matters emerges through ongoing engagement rather than formal assessments.

In our work at BRAC with government partners on poverty reduction programmes, including Graduation initiatives in Indonesia and the Philippines, our teams encountered this challenge directly. While the Graduation approach is well-established, implementing it at scale through government systems is relatively new and inherently non-linear. Our teams in Indonesia and the Philippines found themselves operating in a space where no "blueprint" exists. Because the strategy and approach must vary between countries—and even between different areas in the same country—we faced a distinct methodological challenge: how do we systematically organize the complex qualitative information gathered through our ongoing engagement with government partners and identify entry points for collaboration and experimentation?

To support more structured dialogue and learning in this non-linear context, we developed a rubric as a collaborative diagnostic tool. The rubric helps translate complex qualitative information into a shared reference point for discussion, decision-making, and joint system strengthening over time.

What is the Graduation approach?

The Graduation approach has emerged as an  evidence-informed, multi-component approach to empower individuals and households in abject poverty by providing a packaged set of interventions and enabling them to develop sustainable livelihoods. In practice, the Graduation approach acts as a sequenced, time-bound "big push" designed to simultaneously tackle the multiple reinforcing constraints that trap households in extreme poverty. This multi-dimensional investment is built on three core essentials, often referred to as the Graduation essentials:

• Asset: Providing a productive asset (such as livestock or business tools) to initiate income generation.
• Basic Needs: Delivering consumption support (food or cash) to stabilize the household in the short term.
• Coaching: Providing 18-to-24 months of intensive, ongoing mentorship to unlock agency, know-how, and the resilience required for participants to transition into sustainable, independent livelihoods.

BRAC works with governments to develop, integrate, and scale Graduation programmes within existing policies and programmes, enhancing their capacity to address extreme poverty effectively. As Graduation is taken up through public systems, implementation necessarily varies across institutional contexts, levels of government, and regions.

In this context, our teams in Indonesia and the Philippines developed a rubric to map how Graduation principles can best be integrated into existing government systems. This rubric is not a 'scorecard' used in isolation. Rather, it serves as a collaborative diagnostic tool. We have been testing the rubric as a basis for transparent dialogue with our government partners, many of whom are already exploring ways to modernize and innovate their poverty reduction systems. Rather than producing a standalone rating, it creates space to sit with government partners and identify what strengths can be leveraged now, and where there is scope to co-innovate over time to strengthen systems for the future.

Why a rubric?

A rubric is a matrix that sets out criteria and standards for different levels of performance and describes what performance would look like at each level. According to Jane Davidson, rubrics push teams to articulate "how good is good" and "how good is good enough". They also visualize performance levels, for example, from ‘excellent’ to ‘poor’, thereby informing reflections and team discussions (see Oakden 2013).

For our work, we needed to move beyond anecdotal observations toward a structured, strategic design, both within our teams and alongside our partners. We chose a rubric because it offered a practical way to make qualitative judgements explicit and comparable over time, without reducing complex system dynamics to a single score.

By providing a common language, the rubric helps us pivot from vague aspirations to concrete system-building. It facilitates a transparent dialogue with our partners to identify where existing efforts, such as annual plans, already lay the groundwork for Graduation, and where shifts in funding or human resources are needed to set households on a sustainable path out of extreme poverty.

In developing our rubric, we drew on two established frameworks that help make sense of systemic change: Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation and Systems Innovation. These weren't used as rigid templates, but rather as lenses to help our teams organize the "messy" qualitative data gathered during our engagement with our government partners.

The Triple-A Analysis from PDIA helped us attend to the "change space" by considering where authority, acceptance, and ability to move a policy forward were present or constrained in different government systems. The Four Keys for Shifting Systems (purpose, power, relationships, and resources) complemented this by providing a lens to understand the deeper structures that dictate how a government system behaves.

Together, these frameworks informed the synthesis of high-level systemic concepts into six practical assessment dimensions that our teams use to map government capacity and commitment:

• Strategic alignment (purpose & authority): Policies that signal Graduation is a government priority and legitimize implementation efforts.
• Leadership or sponsorship (power & acceptance): Identifying champions who build momentum and authority for implementation.
• Organizational structure (relationships & power): Clear designation of responsibilities to ensure accountability.
• Funding (ability & resources): The monetary resources required to enable execution.
• Human resources (ability & resources): The skills and capacity necessary for high-quality, effective delivery.
• Scale (systemic outcome): The implementation across administrative units, indicating the breadth of systemic commitment.

The rubric spans four columns, each representing a different level from ‘not in place yet’ to ‘high’, with each column representing an ideal state of full government commitment. To support transparent and consistent judgement and anchor discussion in observable evidence, the final column of our matrix describes the specific methods and evidence sources required to determine the level for each dimension (see image below).

A Rubric for Mapping Government Commitments and Capabilities

View the full rubric using this link: 

While the use of the rubric and its underlying framework are still being piloted, the process of developing and testing them has already yielded valuable insights into how our teams approach systemic change. One immediate benefit has been the ability to organize large volumes of 'messy' qualitative data, helping teams synthesize months of meeting notes and informal documentation into a more structured diagnostic.

Using the rubric has shifted conversations from broad discussions about 'readiness' to more precise mapping of leverage points. In some cases, it has highlighted situations where political commitment is high, but delivery may be constrained by human resource or funding constraints. This clarity is enabling more focused, evidence-based co-design sessions with our partners that are rooted in their contexts and needs.

Conclusion

The rubric presented in this blog is a tool for joint discovery, supporting shared reflection on alignment, capability, and where further system strengthening may be needed. Early experience suggests that this rubric will be a valuable tool for country teams working with governments to implement and monitor Graduation programmes.

While this rubric was developed in the context of scaling Graduation through government systems, the underlying approach may be useful in other settings where complex, multi-dimensional initiatives are being integrated into public policy systems. In such contexts, practitioners often face similar challenges: working without a fixed blueprint, relying on qualitative insights, and needing shared reference points to guide discussion, learning, and decision-making. By offering a structured framework for assessing government or organizational alignment over time, rubrics can help surface strengths and areas for improvement, enhancing the effectiveness of complex initiatives.

Moving forward, we are committed to sharing our experiences with this integrated process in future blog posts. We also look forward to connecting with others who are experimenting with similar monitoring, evidence, and learning innovations for Graduation initiatives globally.