Eight innovation teams win CGIAR’s 2025 Scaling Fund support

Engaging the real-world elements of scaling agrifood solutions

Written by Esther Kihoro

‘Scaling’ an innovation refers to increasing its readiness and use, which in turn increases the benefits the innovation generates. Scaling is needed now more than ever if we are to effect the unprecedented changes needed to transform the global food systems now under increasing multiple threats—e.g., from climate change, gender inequality, unsustainable practices, and growing poverty levels among the smallholder farmers who continue to feed most of the world’s population.

But the truth is that most innovations (agricultural and otherwise) never reach scale. This is due to such oversights as employing too-simplistic ‘copy and paste’ approaches, focusing on pilot projects (‘Pilots never fail, pilots never scale’), ignoring the incentives that would help an innovation to scale and/or the bottlenecks that would impede it, focusing on reaching big numbers rather than generating the system changes needed for an innovation to scale, and not understanding that the people and skills needed to design innovations differ from those needed to scale them.

Furthermore, scaling an innovation is most successful if it includes not just scaling out, by spreading to new users or geographies, but also by scaling up, to influence institutions or policies; scaling deep, to generate changes in behaviors, norms, or systems; and scaling down, to support local adaptations. In addition, responsible scaling ensures that innovation teams not only pursue broader reach and impact but also anticipate, monitor, and mitigate any potential unintended environmental or social consequences that may arise as innovations are adopted at scale.

The CGIAR Scaling Challenge

An annual CGIAR Scaling Challenge, initiated in 2025 by CGIAR’s Scaling for Impact science program, is helping to address these issues. This competition provides the winning innovation teams with scaling grants of USD40,000 each as well as hands-on tailored technical support, expert guidance, and peer learning from the Scaling for Impact program.

In 2025, 32 CGIAR innovation teams applied for support from the Scaling Challenge. Five teams working across Africa, Asia, and Latin America won the competition and are now receiving financial and technical support to help catalyze their ready-to-scale innovations.

These novel projects are addressing five big challenges: (1) protecting people from toxins (aflatoxins) in mold-contaminated grain crops, (2) supporting remote African women farmers to become profitable chicken entrepreneurs, (3) protecting scarce groundwater from over-extraction and other unsustainable uses in South Asia, (4) enabling governments to reliably measure levels of empowerment among men and women in their populations, and (5) providing actionable and contextualized climate information helping farmers to make climate-smart decisions.

The following are this year’s five winning innovation teams.

1 Aflasafe, a research solution of CGIAR’s International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and Sustainable Farming Program, is now readily available to farmers in Southern Africa to reduce aflatoxin contamination in maize, sorghum, and groundnuts. Aflasafe is manufactured and distributed by licensed private-sector companies in Mozambique, Malawi, and Zambia, reaching 100,000-plus farmers, creating awareness of the negative impacts of aflatoxins, and promoting the adoption and use of Aflasafe (for about USD25 per hectare). This food safety innovation employs a private sector-led investment model with technical backstopping by IITA and close collaborations with farmers/producers, government agencies and ministries, and development partners.

2 Women in Business, a project of CGIAR’s International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and Sustainable Animal and Aquatic Foods program, works in East Africa to expand women-led livestock enterprises among 10,000 rural agripreneurs. This innovation employs a mix of technological solutions (e.g., local improved breeds and vaccines) and social solutions (broadcast and social media promoting conducive gender norms) via two business models. One model engages women vets and para-vets in providing women in remote areas with viable poultry breeds, health services, and markets while a second model delivers chicken vaccines to women farmers via drones, apps, and remote vaccine storage facilities.

3 Groundwater Management Information System (GMIS), a project of CGIAR’s International Water Management Institute (IWMI) and Policy Innovations program, works in South Asia to institutionalize water management tools to enhance climate resilience while reducing poverty through more equitable and sustainable groundwater use. This innovation supports both policymakers and implementers and farmer water-user associations in improving groundwater management to reduce excessive pumping and other unsustainable practices. The data-rich tools have been handed over to governments for better decision-making.

4 Women’s Empowerment Metric for National Statistical Systems (WEMNS), a project of CGIAR’s International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), embeds empowerment indicators in national statistical reporting systems in conjunction with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Tanzania. Employing responsible scaling and user-centered design, this innovation is a streamlined tool for measuring empowerment across four domains: Claiming Rights, Making Choices, Engaging in Communities, and Mobilizing Resources. This short empowerment module can be integrated into multi-topic surveys to provide governments critical data on the empowerment status of their population and understand how the empowerment of women and men is linked to other outcomes.

5 Climate Seasonal Forecasts and Automatic Advisories, a project of CGIAR’s Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT (Alliance) and Climate Action Program, works in Latin America to scale climate services to national agricultural systems and 500,000 farmers. This innovation leverages Local Technical Agroclimatic Committees (LTACs) to co-produce actionable and contextualized climate information with farmers, particularly women and Indigenous communities. Through human-centered and participatory design, users actively contribute to redesigning agroclimatic advisories that inform climate-smart decisions.

How CGIAR Scaling Support Works

The scaling support this year began with a strong focus on capacity strengthening, ensuring that all participating teams developed a solid understanding of key scaling concepts. Through a series of masterclasses on Innovation Packaging and Scaling Readiness (IPSR) and Responsible Scaling, five funded teams and two external innovation teams came together for dynamic, learning sessions. Each innovation team has been paired with an embedded Scaling Expert who provides hands-on technical support throughout the implementation phase—guiding scaling diagnostics, partnership mapping, innovation packaging, and scaling optimization.

All teams are currently implementing two to three prioritized scaling activities, with five Innovation Packaging Workshops scheduled to help them identify key scaling bottlenecks, strengthen delivery pathways, and co-develop actionable scaling plans for sustained impact. Teams that have completed their innovation packaging are now progressing to scaling optimization, with tailored support focused on their specific priority needs.

For the third consecutive year, the Scaling Fund is serving as a catalyst for responsible, evidence-based scaling—embedding scaling science into practice, strengthening partnerships, and driving, equitable, and sustainable outcomes.

In addition to the five innovations that received full-fledged support, three additional innovations were selected for needs-driven support. One of these is an initiative promoting use of Urochloa (formerly Brachiaria) hybrid forages to improve livestock productivity, pasture quality, and farmer livelihoods in Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, and Viet Nam; another is training Dairy Farmer Advisor extension workers in Kenya; and a third is disseminating fertilizer recommendation packages in Rwanda.

Each of these innovations will benefit from targeted workshop-based support to strengthen their scaling readiness and stakeholder engagement. The Urochloa initiative will convene a co-creation workshop to develop a unified scaling roadmap for East Africa; the Dairy Farmer Advisor model will be profiled and promoted through a business-anchored scaling workshop in Kenya; and the Rwanda fertilizer innovation will be advanced through two workshops focused on updating innovation packages and inclusive dissemination planning.