On scaling agricultural innovations: Insights from 2024 Scaling Fund winners

"He aha te mea nuio te ao? He tangata, he tangata, he tangata. (What is the most important thing in the world? It is people, it is people, it is people.)"

These profound words set the tone for the Scaling Fund session at Scaling Week 2024, reflecting the people-centered approach of the Ukama UstawiScaling Fund. Over the past year, the Fund facilitated meaningful collaborations among a diverse range of stakeholders, including CGIAR'sInnovation Packaging and Scaling Readiness (IPSR) team, three innovation-winning teams from different CGIAR Centers, and their partners-private-sector actors, farmers, and government officials.

Together, these groups worked to bridge the gap between research and practical impact, turning innovative ideas into scalable solutions. Scaling Week 2024 provided a platform to celebrate these efforts, showcasing how collaboration and strategic partnerships can drive meaningful progress in addressing critical challenges in agriculture, livestock, and sustainable development.

Esther Kihoro, a scientistwith the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), hosted a parallel session during Scaling Week 2024, which was held on ILRI's campus in Nairobi, Kenya, in early December. Kihoro manages the Ukama UstawiScaling Fund, which she introduced beforethe three 2024 Fund winners presented snapshots of their achievements.

Esther Kihoro, of ILRI (photo credit: ILRI).

Kihoroexplained that theScaling Fund helpsto close gaps between innovation research and delivery."Three innovation teams were granted funding in early 2024. Each team got USD125,000 as well as additional in-kind support. These include capacity-building activities conducted in a Marchscaling readiness course, GenderUptraining, and a responsible scaling workshop in Nairobi. InApril, the three winners conductedan 'Innovation Packagesand Scaling Readiness'workshop, where they andtheir partners determined some of the key barriersto taking their innovation to scale. Theparticipants in these workshops involved some 85 diverse stakeholders.Each of the innovation teamsthen developed a work planand began implementing it to address some of those barriers. Later still, our Scaling Fund team got together with the key players again todevelop strategies for scaling their innovations.

"And here we are now, at Scaling Week,to hear from the three winning teams about what they've achieved."

Marcel Gatto and Dinah Borus, of CIP (photo credit: CGIAR/Susan MacMillan).

VarScout

First up was VarScout, a digital system to collect, store, and visualize crop varietaldata. Marcel Gatto, a scientist with the International Potato Center (CIP), started his presentation about VarScout bydeclaring "Data is power. Like anywhere, in agriculture, decision-making is based on data. We need data to determinewhat to breed for. And for that, we need to know what farmers are currently cultivating-and where, when, and for how long. This information is also critical forguiding agricultural investments. But the crop data that we have arescant, are updated infrequently, are scattered, and are expensiveto collect. Our innovation isa tool for collecting crop varietal data frequently and cost-effectively."

Gatto's CIP colleague Dinah Borus then explained that all the data VarScoutcollects is stored in an online"one-stop-shopwhere you can just click to get the information. Here in Kenya where we launched VarScoutin November 2022, we're using VarScout to determine varieties of potato, sweet potato, beans, cassava, and banana. With the support of the Scaling Fund, we have now collected27,000 data points, with about 23,000of them collected in justfive months, passing thetarget goalthat we had set."

Gatto then pointed outthat "We havefound and builta good model for working through Kenya'sextension services. Without using extension agentsgoing about theirdaily work, we would never have been able to cost-effectively collect such data."

Gatto then invited everyone to create an account on the VarScoutwebsite. "All our results are displayed there inheatmaps. We cannow see the adoption rates of crop varietiesand what varieties areperforming wellin different areas. Wecan also see the number of unique varietiesbeing cultivatedand where there's the mostdiversity. We can see iffarmers are makinguse of new seedsor if they're continuing to grow old varieties. We can see what varieties are most popular with farmers. All of this helps us to find ways to give farmers what they want butalso to introduce new varieties that are better adapted, for example, to climate change and pests.

"This is just the start of whatwe can do withthese maps. We can overlay these datawith production data, with certified seed data we have collected. We can overlay these datawith data on project investments, enabling donors to see the impact of theirinvestments.We want toscale this workup, but we also want toscale it out. Some great opportunities for that are emerging in Zimbabweandin Mozambique."

Shalika Vyas, of Alliance of BioversityInternational and CIAT (photo credit: CGIAR/Susan MacMillan).

ShambaShield

Up next was ShalikaVyas, of the CGIAR Alliance of Bioversityand the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, who spoke about ShambaShield, a CGIAR "bundledinnovation"of microfinancing and insurance for deriskingagriculture forsmallholderfarmers.

"Rural Kenyans havesubstantial exposure to risk across different farming systems, such as dairying and maize cropping, with atotal value of up to USD1.5 billion per year exposed to different climaterisk. Some 70% of Kenyanfarmers lack formal financial inclusion. They don't have access to credit through banking systems. And thereare rising operational costs in terms of inflation compliance costs, which challenge microfinance institutionsand banks. And increasing climate stress further compounds all these risks.

"But there is also an opportunity. Kenya hasa very diverse financial sector, including not only 39 commercial banks but also 56 microfinance institutions working to providelending solutions to farmers. The microfinance sector in Kenya was worth USD1.7 billion in 2021 and the number of customers of M-Pesa, Kenya's largest mobile phone-based money transfer service, continuesto increase every year, standing at 34 million customers in December 2024.

"Withthe Scaling Fund, we developedthree work packagesfor our project. The first one was to determine what is already out there, what existing products are in the market.Our second work package focused on user needs: What are the pain points ofthe farmers, ofthe loan officers, ofthe banking institutions?We're now in the final phase of developing a playbook on how to make creditscoring work in Kenya. The third workpackage focuses on developing a scaling strategy, including who towork with to help us scale this innovation.

"We co-designed financial literacy component in Shamba Shape Up, a popular agricultural TV program with an estimated audience of up to four million viewers. With 30% of Kenya's farmers struggling to understand financial products like loans and insurance, we focused the Shamba Shape Up series on how these work and what farmers can do to make themselves more bankable. Farmers who received our information on financial products exhibited higher adoption rates, especially in accessing loans and insurance, and improved their understanding of how to interact with bank officials.

"This year we designed an operation for two insurance companies for up to 5,000 farmers. We built the capacity of 2,000 farmers. We piloted the credit scoring system with three microfinance institutions, reaching up to 100 farmers; we want to scale this to more farmers next year by working with Safaricom's DigiFarm mobile platform. We engaged with five microfinance institutions. Social media reach of Shamba Shape Up is upto 1.2 million in 2024. 90% of the farmers in our survey considered the content very useful and 50% of them made changes in their farms as a result."

Bester Mudereri, of CIP (photo credit: CGIAR/Susan MacMillan).

SNS Fertilizer Recommendation Tool

The final short presentation by a Scaling Fund winner was by Bester Mudereri, of the International Potato Center(CIP) in Rwanda. "Our fertilizer recommendations-which are specific for each farm and location and agroecology and for each of six of Rwanda's staple crops-have been plugged into a digital system of the government-called the 'Smart Nkunganire System(SNS)-which provides Rwandan farmers with subsidized fertilizer and seed.

"With the Scaling Fund support, we heldan Innovation Package and Scaling Readiness workshopin April to help us determine the bottlenecks to scaling our fertilizer recommendation tool. We came up with four workstreamsto address these challenges. We identified problems farmers had in using this system. Additionally, weconsidered bottlenecks in the fertilizer value chain itself. To ensure we had covered what the government wanted and needed in thispublic-private partnershipas well as the needs of the end-user, we conductedseveral workshopsandfocus group discussionswith farmers and agro-dealers and sector agronomists intwo districtstargeting information gathering towards a human-/user-centered approach.

"The information and intelligence that we gathered pointed to making Rwanda's Smart Nkunganire System more reliable and easierto use. It was clear that training farmers on how to use the SNS system was also critical, as many of them used agro-dealers and others as intermediaries to engage with the system. We were able to reach 7,500 farmers fromAugustto December38% of themwomen. This past Friday(29thNovember 2024), we launched our fertilizerrecommendation tool within the government system. More than100 people attended the launch, including Rwanda's minister of agriculture and animal resourcesand several other high-ranking government officials andpartners who have also come with us here to attend the Scaling Week."

Michael Upton, New Zealand High Commissioner to Kenya and Ambassador to Ethiopia (photo credit: ILRI).

New Zealand's scaling support

Following the presentations on the achievements of the three Scaling Fund winners, Esther Kihoroinvited Michael Upton-non-resident New Zealand High Commissioner in Kenya as well as Ambassador to Ethiopia and the African Union, representing the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT), which has helped to finance this agricultural scaling work-for his reflections on the three presentations and on when and why New Zealand began supporting CGIAR's collaborative scaling work.

"Around 2014-15," the High Commissioner noted, "New Zealand increased its engagement in Africa. Here in Kenya, we invested in a project for avocado improvement because we had relevant experience in New Zealand and a New Zealand private-sector operator working in Kenya. And sowe embarked on a 6-8-year program, investing around NZD$5 million over that period. The project had lots of good outcomes, but its reach was limitedand it was very resource-intensive. We had similar experiences in Botswana and Southern Africa. And that's what led us to start working with partners who are engaged across several countries, ones who are trusted partners with deep ongoing relationships and experience in those countries. That's when we partnered with CGIAR. Working together gives us a bigger reach and scale, which is really importantfor us, and it also improves coordination and reduces the burden on each partner, making projects both more efficient and more effective.

"I'm hoping that we'll be able to continue this partnership. We want to keep New Zealand's projects joined up. And we want to work with partners with good connections on the ground."

"What I heard this morning is that you're tapping into local knowledge, that you have local experience, and that you understand the specific needs of specific farming communities. So, yes, you're scaling across but you're also adapting to the local context. I took that away today."

High Commissioner Upton also emphasized that continuity in partnerships and sustained support are crucialfor achieving long-term impact. He concluded the session by sharing a Māori proverb:

"He aha te mea nuio te ao? He tangata, he tangata, he tangata. (What is the most important thing in the world? It is people, it is people, it is people.)"

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