Eight innovation teams win CGIAR’s 2025 Scaling Fund support

CGIAR Nov 2025

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.

See: https://www.cgiar.org/news-events/news/eight-innovation-teams-win-cgiars-2025-scaling-fund-support/