CGIAR System Organization - Consortium of International Agricultural Research Centers

10/09/2025 | News release | Distributed by Public on 10/09/2025 11:53

Enhancing inclusive learning and capacity strengthening space with scaling science and practices

The International Water Management Institute (IWMI), under the CGIAR Scaling for Impact (S4I)Program, hosted a hybrid capacity-building day to strengthen the team's understanding of scaling science and practices. With colleagues joining both in person and online, the event created an inclusive space for learning, reflection, and collaboration across regions. At its heart, the day echoed S4I's learning ambition: to foster systems-thinking and a culture of diverse and continuous learning on scaling agrifood innovations by advancing scaling science, conducting holistic impact assessments, enhancing innovation portfolio coordination, and institutionalizing experiential learning through capacity building, South-South exchanges, and documenting lessons to refine practices and inform agricultural training across regions.

Through interactive discussions, participants explored scaling approaches - from technology-driven solutions and market-based strategies to policy engagement and community-led pathways - weighing their applications, benefits, and limitations. Together, the team reaffirmed the value of shared learning to achieve sustainable, system-wide impact.

Responsive scaling

Addressing responsible and inclusive scaling was central to the workshop. Participants reflected on how scaling processes must recognize social differentiation, acknowledging that innovations affect women, men, youth, and marginalized groups in different ways. This calls for power-sensitive approaches that ensure meaningful inclusion in decision-making and equitable sharing of benefits. Embedding the six dimensions of responsible innovation provides a guiding compass: anticipation helps us consider how scaling choices will shape diverse communities in the future; inclusion ensures those voices are not just heard but integrated; reflexivity pushes us to question our assumptions and practices; responsiveness enables adaptation as new gender and social insights emerge; legitimacy is strengthened when institutions align with local cultural and governance contexts; and knowledge, co-created with diverse actors, helps foster adaptive learning and stronger networks. Together, these principles support scaling pathways that are equitable, contextually grounded, and transformative.

Scaling Scan

Scaling scan is a tool that supports individuals and groups to characterize and assess the scaling context, assess the tradeoff of innovation with environment and society, facilitate the setting of ambition in a participatory approach, and capacitate stakeholders to identify challenges and opportunities in their scaling strategies. The scaling scan consists of a three-step procedure: develop a scaling ambition, check the social environmental and trade-offs responsibility, and score the scaling environment with respect to 10 scaling ingredients. These ingredients represent the different fields of expertise that need attention for scaling to be successful. Scaling strategies are developed after analyzing challenges and opportunities, articulating what requires attention in the implementation strategy to reach the scaling ambition. The scaling scan toolkithas been developed and used in over 50 workshops in Asia, Africa, and Latin America by different organizations (Kangetha et al., 2021; Woltering et al., 2024) and was used for cross-regional comparisons of innovation and capacity development to identify bottlenecks for scaling.

Adaptive Scaling

IWMI has co-developed and applied the system-based, adaptive scaling approachacross numerous projects, countries, and regions in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. The adaptive scaling is an agile standing process by which farmers, actors, and their networks are involved, cooperate, feed off, adapt, support, compete, and interact with each other and with actants to respond to the contextual dynamics of agricultural innovation scaling. It translates food-system complexity into actionable levers by clarifying innovation scaling boundaries, aligning actor networks with scaling functions, and fostering continuous adaptation through feedback and coevolution, thereby managing the systems' non-linear dynamics and trade-offs. It takes different pathways through those dynamic barriers and opportunities to catalyze innovations for system changes. These pathways include, but are not limited to, developing and bundling the best-fit innovation bundles, multi-actor scaling partnerships, private sector investments, multi-stakeholder dialogues, the best-fit institutional capacity development, and scaling preparedness development. Hence, it offers a practical, adaptable approach for designing, steering, and learning from adaptive scaling processes for complex food system transformation.

Along with the development of the adaptive scaling approach, IWMI has developed an adaptive scaling toolkit to facilitate the scaling of agricultural innovations, water solutions, climate-smart agriculture, climate information services, farmer-led irrigation development, and data-driven tools for agricultural water management. The toolkit provides users (e.g., A4D organizations, practitioners, development partners, public and private sector entities) with diverse practical tools to enable adaptive scaling in ways that are flexible, context-specific, adaptive to contextual dynamics, and responsive to feedback, opening alignment with local needs, governance, and power dynamics, coalitions, and policy and institutional changes. Specific objectives are to conduct system and enabling environment analysis and demand signalling for decision-making and designing scaling pathways, facilitate scaling partnership and private sector engagement, design and conduct process-based scaling impact assessment, and design and facilitate sustainable finance for agricultural innovation scaling. Developing the toolkit is an ongoing process of accumulating insights and relevant tools developed throughout the implementation of IWMI's bilateral research projects and Science and acceleration programs.

Market Systems

Scaling innovations is not just about introducing new technologies-it's about transforming the systems in which they operate. This was the core message of the recent session "Scaling Innovations through Market Systems: MSD Meets CGIAR", where we explored how the Market Systems Development (MSD) approach can strengthen CGIAR's Scaling for Impact agenda. MSD places local actors, private sector incentives, and long-term systemic change at the center, making scaling more sustainable, inclusive, and impactful than conventional project-driven models. Practical experiences from Nepal and Jordanhighlighted the power of this approach. In Nepal, CIMMYT's seed sector work through the NSAF project helped build resilient seed systems by improving R&D, expanding hybrid seed production hubs, and strengthening seed enterprises through finance, partnerships, and digital platforms. In Jordan, IWMI and partners used a market-driven approachto promote water-saving technologies, saving 28 million cubic meters of waterwhile building sustainable business models for suppliers, advisory systems, and financial products that continued beyond donor funding.

These examples demonstrate that combining CGIAR's innovation-focused scaling with MSD's market-centered change creates a powerful framework for systemic transformation. By aligning research, policy, finance, and private-sector engagement, we can ensure that innovations reach more farmers, deliver lasting impact, and respond to local needs. Scaling for impact requires not only technical solutions, but also trust, partnerships, and the creation of enabling environments that make adoption both possible and desirable.

Scaling Readiness

The Scaling Readinessframework is a systematic approach to CGIAR and partners to assess, manage, and accelerate the scaling of innovations such as new crop varieties, policies, or digital tools, helping them to achieve impact at scale in the agri-food sector. It emphasizes the need for innovations to be assessed, tested, and validated for their intended roles in society, considering context and addressing scaling bottlenecks. By using Innovation Readiness and Innovation Use Levels, Scaling Readiness supports evidence-based decision-making and enables CGIAR centers for wider innovation portfolio management. Scaling Readiness places both technological and non-technological innovations at the center, making scaling more sustainable, inclusive, and impactful than conventional project-driven models.

The session was also used to share experience on how scaling readiness is put into practice through the Innovation Packages and Scaling Readiness (IPSR) framework. Innovation packages are combinations of solutions and enabling conditions tailored to specific contexts and developed with partners during a 1-day interactive IPSR workshop. It was highlighted that the innovation packaging process is very useful because it fosters collaboration among partners, supports the formation of fit-for-purpose partnerships, and helps identify and address bottlenecks to scaling.

The participants were introduced to the Scaling Readiness calculator- a simple online tool to support a systematic process for determining readiness and use levels of innovations. Through a practical exercise, participants used this calculator to assess the readiness of solar irrigation in their respective regions. Further, they identified solutions for scaling solar irrigation using the list of enablersprovided by the IPSR framework.

What We Valued

Participants highlighted the value they placed on the diversity of approaches presented. This breadth helped illustrate that scaling is not a one-size-fits-all process but rather a set of complementary tools that can be adapted to different contexts. Many also emphasized that the capacity building itself was a highlight, providing a rare and valuable space for structured learning, exchange, and reflection across offices and disciplines. The manageable group size, combined with the hybrid set-up, further enriched the experience by allowing everyone to participate meaningfully.

What We Could Improve

Looking ahead, several ideas emerged on how to strengthen future workshops. Suggestions included inviting colleagues beyond the S4I Program to enrich cross-disciplinary learning, creating opportunities for more in-person interactions across offices, and experimenting with practical, use-case applications to make the approaches even more tangible.

What We Should Carry Forward

There was a strong interest in building momentum through a working group on scaling, potentially at both global and country levels. Participants also expressed curiosity about ways to deepen collaboration with development partners and the private sector, and to better share knowledge and expertise across IWMI offices, particularly around innovations like solar solutions.

Moving Ahead

The reflections point to a clear direction: keep the strengths that made this workshop engaging - notably the diverse scaling perspectives and the focus on capacity building - while creating more spaces for practical application, inclusivity, and cross-learning. By doing so, we can ensure that each capacity-building day not only enhances knowledge but also strengthens our collective ability to scale innovations for lasting impact.

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