Scaling-up while scaling-out: Digital climate services and their institutional use for agricultural extension in Bangladesh

This brief discusses the factors involved in scaling-up ‘Agvisely’, a digital climate service decision support system (DSS) in Bangladesh. Agvisely has already been scaled-out, with over 8,000 extension officers trained and registered to use the dynamic weather forecast-based crop advisories generated by Agvisely’s algorithms. Agvisely however still needs to be ‘scaled-up’. In other words, efforts are still needed to assure sustained use by extension services in Bangladesh on a formal and institutional basis. In this brief, we highlight a mixed approach including literature review and structured feedback from extension officers to identify potential factors associated with scaling-up Agvisely’s use to advise farmers. We adapted the ‘Scaling Scan’ to structure feedback from extension officers and identify options for scaling-up efforts.