These profound words set the tone for the Scaling Fund session at Scaling Week 2024, reflecting the people-centered approach of the Ukama Ustawi Scaling Fund. Over the past year, the Fund facilitated meaningful collaborations among a diverse range of stakeholders, including CGIAR’s Innovation 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 scientist with 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 Ustawi Scaling Fund, which she introduced before the three 2024 Fund winners presented snapshots of their achievements.
Kihoro explained that the Scaling Fund helps to 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 March scaling readiness course, GenderUp training, and a responsible scaling workshop in Nairobi. In April, the three winners conducted an ‘Innovation Packages and Scaling Readiness’ workshop, where they and their partners determined some of the key barriers to taking their innovation to scale. The participants in these workshops involved some 85 diverse stakeholders. Each of the innovation teams then developed a work plan and began implementing it to address some of those barriers. Later still, our Scaling Fund team got together with the key players again to develop 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.“
VarScout digital tool
First up was VarScout, a digital system to collect, store, and visualize crop varietal data. Marcel Gatto, a scientist with the International Potato Center (CIP), started his presentation about VarScout app by declaring “Data is power. Like anywhere, in agriculture, decision–making is based on data. We need data to determine what 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 for guiding agricultural investments. But the crop data that we currently have are scant, updated infrequently, scattered, and are expensive to collect. Our innovation is a digital tool for collecting crop varietal data frequently and cost–effectively.”
Gatto’s CIP colleague Dinah Borus then explained that all the crop varietal data collected through the VarScout app is stored online serving as a “one–stop–information hub where users can simply click to access the crop varietal data. In Kenya, the digital app was launched in November 2022 in Nakuru County. The app has been used by trained extension officers to collect varietal data for potato, sweetpotato, maize and beans. With the support of the Scaling Fund, the extension officers collected over 27,000 varietal data in just seven months, June-December 2024, surpassing the ambitious target goal of 20,000 data points for the year 2024. “
Gatto then pointed out that “We have found and built a good model for working through Kenya’s extension services. Without using extension agents going about their daily work, we would never have been able to cost-effectively collect such data”.
Gatto then invited everyone to create an account on the VarScout website. “All our results are displayed as heat maps. Users can see the adoption rates of crop varieties and which varieties are performing well in different areas. Users can also see the number of unique varieties being cultivated and where there’s the most diversity. The heat maps also show if farmers are making use of new varieties or if they’re continuing to grow the older varieties and what varieties are most popular with farmers. All of this helps us to find ways to give farmers what they want but also to introduce new varieties that are better adapted, for example, to climate change and resistance to diseases and pests.
ShambaShield
Up next was Shalika Vyas, of the CGIAR Alliance of Bioversity and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, who spoke about ShambaShield, a CGIAR “bundled innovation“ of microfinancing and insurance for derisking agriculture for smallholder farmers.
“Rural Kenyans have substantial exposure to risk across different farming systems, such as dairying and maize cropping, with a total value of up to USD1.5 billion per year exposed to different climate risk. Some 70% of Kenyan farmers lack formal financial inclusion. They don’t have access to credit through banking systems. And there are rising operational costs in terms of inflation compliance costs, which challenge microfinance institutions and banks. And increasing climate stress further compounds all these risks.
“But there is also an opportunity. Kenya has a very diverse financial sector, including not only 39 commercial banks but also 56 microfinance institutions working to provide lending 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, continues to increase every year, standing at 34 million customers in December 2024.
“With the Scaling Fund, we developed three work packages for 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 of the farmers, of the loan officers, of the banking institutions? We‘re now in the final phase of developing a playbook on how to make credit scoring work in Kenya. The third work package focuses on developing a scaling strategy, including who to work 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.”
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 held an Innovation Package and Scaling Readiness workshop in April to help us determine the bottlenecks to scaling our fertilizer recommendation tool. We came up with four workstreams to address these challenges. We identified problems farmers had in using this system. Additionally, we considered bottlenecks in the fertilizer value chain itself. To ensure we had covered what the government wanted and needed in this public–private partnership as well as the needs of the end-user, we conducted several workshops and focus group discussions with farmers and agro-dealers and sector agronomists in two districts targeting 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 easier to 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 from August to December 38% of them women. This past Friday (29th November 2024), we launched our fertilizer recommendation tool within the government system. More than 100 people attended the launch, including Rwanda’s minister of agriculture and animal resources and several other high–ranking government officials and partners who have also come with us here to attend the Scaling Week.“
New Zealand’s scaling support
Following the presentations on the achievements of the three Scaling Fund winners, Esther Kihoro invited 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.
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