After piloting the programme for about half a year, a first up-scaling was undertaken in June 2006 by extending it to two schools per district, and then subsequently to five schools per district. It has been suggested the GNSP and its predecessor might have been directly influenced by the transnational poverty agenda of the 2000s. However, Grebe (2015) draws attention to the "largely domestic" roots of these two policy frameworks. He traces their adoption to the identification of extreme poverty as a major impediment to the country's ambition of attaining middle-income status, particularly during the implementation period of the country's first Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP): Growth and Poverty Reduction Strategy (GPRS) I 2003-2005.