Scaling an innovation for safer food and healthier people in Africa

Agricultural research has produced many innovations with proven technical value. But very few make the leap from successful trials or early adoption to widespread use by farmers, businesses, and institutions. CGIAR calls the space between those two points the “valley of death”: the stage where promising solutions need solid investment commitments, market analysis, partnership-brokering and policy engagement.

The CGIAR Scaling Fund was created to help close that gap. Operated and funded by CGIAR’s Scaling for Impact Program (S4I) and coordinated by the Impact at Scale Program (I@S) at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), the Fund annually provides small, catalytic grants alongside hands-on technical support. Its purpose is not to finance more discovery, but to help CGIAR innovation scaling teams and partners diagnose barriers, strengthen delivery models, engage institutions, and turn promising solutions into viable scaling plans.

In 2025, this Scaling Fund supported 8 innovation teams across 5 CGIAR Centers, 6 CGIAR science programs, and 11 countries. It did so through two windows: the Scaling Challenge, which awarded five teams USD40,000 each with embedded scaling expertise, and Needs-Driven Support, which provided three teams with USD10,000 each for targeted activities to unlock bottlenecks.

One awardee of the Scaling Challenge 2025 was the Aflasafe technology, a natural biocontrol product developed by CGIAR’s International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and partners to prevent aflatoxin contamination. Aflasafe introduces native non-aflatoxin-producing strains of Aspergillus flavus into the field, where they outcompete aflatoxin-producing strains and in doing so prevent contamination. Farmer-led field trials in several countries in Africa, including Malawi and Mozambique, have shown that use of Aflasafe can reduce aflatoxin contamination by 80 to 100% when applied correctly.

IITA spent 12 years developing, testing, and registering Aflasafe before licensing commercial partners from 2016. This novel research-based product is registered and available in Malawi, Mozambique, and Zambia, but adoption has remained far below potential. The challenge was not improving the technology but rather ensuring that the partnerships, incentives, delivery channels, certification systems, and markets needed for scaling the technology were ready for convergence.

That is where the Scaling for Impact program made a difference. Through the CGIAR Scaling Fund, IITA and its licensed partners —The Anchorage Group in Malawi and AflaLivre SA in Mozambique—convened workshops in November 2025 to “package” their innovations and to determine their “scaling readiness” using a novel step-by-step CGIAR method known as “Innovation Packaging and Scaling Readiness” (IPSR). More than 80 participants—from government ministries, standards bodies, financial institutions, farmer cooperatives, food and feed processors, commodity traders, local NGOs, universities, and relief agencies—joined these workshops.

For IITA’s Jane Kamau, who leads Aflasafe’s commercialization and scaling work, the value of the Scaling Fund was not only the money it provided but also the structure and discipline it created. The process gave the team and licensed partners time “to reflect, to think things through with stakeholders” about what needed to change and who needed to be involved to improve adoption.

The workshop design moved partners from discussion to delivery. They built a shared understanding of the aflatoxin problem and the Aflasafe solution, surfaced barriers to Aflasafe’s adoption and co-created solutions, scored the solutions for feasibility and impact, and converted the strongest ideas into costed action plans with designated owners, timelines, and indicators.

The barriers across the three countries were similar: low awareness of aflatoxin, limited awareness of Aflasafe without visible demonstrations, affordability and availability constraints, lack of aflatoxin testing and certification at grain buying points, limited access by women to credit and training, and weak coordination among the stakeholders responsible for addressing this crosscutting challenge.

In Malawi, where a break in supply had left the market thin, the IPSR workshop helped The Anchorage Group to formally relaunch the Aflasafe technology with the Ministry of Agriculture. The workshop produced nine mini-strategies covering communication, coordination, certification, distribution, affordability, user training, and market links, which became the backbone of The Anchorage Group’s 2026 operational plans.

The Anchorage Group also set up a sister company to off-take aflatoxin-safe commodities, giving farmers who apply Aflasafe a guaranteed market. The Anchorage Group and stakeholders also worked to revive the National Aflatoxin Consultation Forum to coordinate aflatoxin initiatives across government, academia, research, development, and the private sector.

An unexpected outcome. World Food Programme staff in Malawi initially joined the Malawi workshop mainly to observe. “They hadn’t known much about the Aflasafe technology before the workshop,” Kamau recalled, but afterwards they secured their own funds and organized integrated aflatoxin management training for the farmers they support, with IITA and The Anchorage Group providing technical support.

“The stakeholder workshop on the scaling of Aflasafe in Malawi provided clear direction for effective outreach and awareness raising and established a strong platform for coordinated action.”
—Khumbo Jambo of The Anchorage Group

In Mozambique, Aflasafe use had been concentrated among about 6,000 groundnut producers in Nampula and Zambézia affiliated to AflaLivre, a pioneering agriculture and food safety company. The workshop brought together 29 representatives from certification bodies, ministries, the national research institute, universities, agro-dealers, NGOs, and feed and food processors. These participants jointly developed a grain certification system proposal and submitted it to the Ministry of Health. If approved, this will establish the country’s first certification pathway for aflatoxin-safe maize, groundnut and sorghum.

Mozambique also became a regional manufacturing hub. In its first year of local production, the AflaLivre factory produced close to 200 metric tonnes of Aflasafe, supplying Mozambique, Malawi, and Zambia. “For AflaLivre to begin at almost 200 metric tonnes in just the first year of operation is exceptional,” Kamau said.

"The Scaling Fund IPSR workshop gave us an opportunity to think deeply about what we need to do to improve adoption of Aflasafe. We now know what to focus on in 2026 and beyond and who to engage to build a strong distribution system and to enforce aflatoxin standards in the country.”
—Abdul Satar Sumara of AflaLivre Mozambique

In Zambia, the immediate scaling challenge was distribution. Aflasafe has to be imported from AflaLivre in Mozambique. After an initial licensed distributor did not work out, IITA began licensing a new partner and coordinating with government agencies and programs to integrate Aflasafe into existing input delivery channels rather than building parallel systems, thereby strengthening Zambia’s role as a regional exporter of maize and groundnut.

Added value
Taken together, this three-country push shows the added value of CGIAR’s Scaling Fund. While the size of the Scaling Fund grant was modest, it changed what partners were able to do. This included relaunching a stalled market in Malawi, mobilizing self-funded farmer training, co-creating a certification system, accelerating regional production of Aflasafe, and re-igniting its distribution pathways in Zambia.

For Esther Kihoro, who leads the Scaling Fund work at ILRI, the Fund is most productive when “investing a little money where you have already done some groundwork and where you have partners who bring a clear, specific request to the table.” That combination, she said, is what helped this innovation team to unlock ways to meet its large ambition—to have 2 million farmers using Aflasafe in Malawi, 1.3 million farmers and value-chain actors reached in Mozambique, and reliable in-country distribution established in Zambia by 2030.