In just three years (1996-1999), the Childline India Foundation was able to replicate Childline, an emergency hotline for India's street children, to every major city in India. They did this not by scaling the Childline model up but scaling it out. Childline's founder, Jeroo Billimoria, says adopting an adaptive blueprinting strategy was not the result of an epiphany on her part but merely out of necessity. She wanted to expand Childline to as many cities as possible in the shortest time possible, but the foundation had very limited financial resources and staff. She knew the Childine model was working, and she wanted to help as many children as possible so there was always a sense of urgency about scaling.

She also recognized that Childline was a blueprint of sorts, so she sought partners who were already well-established in the cities she wanted to expand to and designed a streamlined system for training them on how to implement the blueprint. Today, Childline operates in over 70 of India's largest cities, has received over 10 million calls, and has worked with over 3 million children with urgent needs. After eight years of growing Childline, Jeroo had the opportunity in 2004 to take what she had learned and apply it on a global scale as the Executive Director of Child Helpline International, a worldwide network of child hotlines consisting of 89 members from 77 countries.

Global Gain is grateful for Jeroo for consulting with us on adaptive blueprinting and scaling-out. An interview with Jeroo conducted by Global Gain's Executive Director, Nathan Cryder, can be found here . Childline's success was chronicled in David Bornstein's book, How to Change the World, and a detailed description of how Childline scaled-out can be found in the book Childline 1098 Night and Day, written by a close partner of Global Gain, Manisha Gupta.

Child Friendly Villages

In 2007, Global Gain plans to carefully document and make accessible via our website and other mediums another case study in adaptive blueprinting. The blueprint is one developed by the Indian NGO Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA) called Child Friendly Villages (or Bal Mitra Grams) to eliminate child labor and achieve 100% school enrollment in India's villages using a grassroots approach. Global Gain will be working directly with BBA to spread the blueprint from 150 villages to approximately 1000 villages. Much of the documentation and hands-on implementation will be done with the help of Manisha Gupta, a Global Gain partner who is a social entrepreneur and author with many years of experience working with organizations which have implemented adaptive blueprinting strategies.