The challenges facing social entrepreneurs are enormous. Literally billions of people live in poverty around the world. Climate change engulfs the entire planet, but disproportionately poor people living in Southern countries. Thinking of the sheer magnitude of the many social problems we face cannot help but evoke a feeling of pessimism.

The Friday morning panel on replication and scale tackled these issues, sharing insights on how to achieve scale with your social initiative to meet these enormous problems head to head. Dorothy Stoneman, Founder and President of YouthBuild USA kicked things off and took us through 15 simultaneous steps towards going to scale with public funds. Her biggest piece of advice: you must be able to handle what you create. And you need the resources and capabilities to match your vision.

Martin Burt, Founder of Fundacion Paraguaya and Teach a Man to Fish went next. “If you come from a developing country,” he started, “you have a mentality that you cannot work internationally.” However, organizations in the North are expected almost by right to work all over the world. After a good push from the Skoll Foundation, Martin was able to think bigger and take his model to other developing countries. He felt that he had a distinct advantage in that he could empathise with what it's like to live in poverty, and could see through excuses

Chuck Slaughter, Founder and President of Living Goods, was the final speaker. He outlined the benefits of the franchising model and stressed the tools that can be brought from the private sector to the development sector. "Make no mistake: sustainability and scale go together," was his bold proclamation.

The problem I’ve seen with initiatives on the ground is that scale often comes at the expense of quality. The biggest organizations are often doing the worst work. We need to clearly separate scaling up an organisation with scaling up the social impact of an organisation. In business speak, this is analagous to adding value as opposed to capturing market share; the companies with the highest profit margins are not necessarily the biggest. Even a small organisation often has many untouched areas where they can leverage the impact of their work without seeking additional funding.

Paul Farmer highlighted this point his keynote address at the closing session. He criticised social entrepreneurs with being "obsessed with scale" to the point where we "fetishise" it. His point was not to avoid the question of going to scale, but rather to consider it critically.