The world has the science to transform food systems. The next frontier is scaling it. The Conversation Director - CGIAR Scaling for Impact June 30, 2026 The world’s food systems face real and urgent challenges. These include climate change, nutrition insecurity, food safety, and unequal access to markets. Research has produced practical solutions to each of these that could benefit hundreds of millions of people. Too few are moved into widespread use.For years, the development sector has flattered itself with pilots. A new tool works in a controlled pilot, a crop variety performs well in a field trial, and a digital advisory service shows promise in early testing. Evidence is written up, a case study or experiment is published, and then comes the familiar refrain: now we need to “take it to scale”. That is the moment the real difficulty begins.
Solutions do not spread simply because they are good. They move, or fail to move, through systems where scientific supply and demand for innovative solutions are frequently misaligned. Policy environments are not ready, financing is difficult to mobilise, demand is weak, and markets are not designed to carry promising ideas beyond their pilot phase. These are some of the challenges that have faced CGIAR, the world’s largest publicly funded research-for-development partnership focused on agriculture and food systems. But these challenges are not limited to CGIAR alone; they are common in research for development.The world does not just need more breakthroughs. It needs more organisations that know how to turn scientific advances into adoption, investment and lasting use. Put plainly, it needs stronger efforts to move proven science into widespread use. That sounds abstract. It is not. As director of CGIAR’s Scaling for Impact Program, which works with partners across Africa, Asia and Latin America to connect innovations with the systems and investments needed to scale them, I have seen this pattern myself. The evidence from that work consistently points to the same conclusion: scaling must be treated as a core part of the scientific process – built into research from the start, with systems thinking prioritised, not treated as a final phase.
What it takes to scale up.....Scaling is about asking different questions earlier in the research process – identifying the challenges that prevent innovations from moving into use, and charting strategies and actions to overcome them. Not just: does this solution work? But: who will deliver it, who will pay for it, what incentive do they have, what regulations apply, what evidence unlocks funding, and what has to change in the surrounding system for uptake to last beyond a project cycle? Those questions are rarely asked early enough in the research process. Yet they determine whether a promising idea becomes a public good or another stranded pilot. One example of what this looks like in practice is a “clearinghouse” created under the African Development Bank’s Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation programme, now integrated into the CGIAR Scaling for Impact programme. Its role is not to invent new technologies, but to make proven ones usable at scale: validating them, packaging them with complementary innovations, and linking them to large public investments and agricultural delivery systems. That model is now positioned to connect agricultural innovations to a US$1.5 billion AfDB-backed portfolio in 2026, expected to benefit 3.4 million additional smallholder farmers. In Nigeria, it helped connect heat-tolerant wheat varieties – developed to maintain yields as temperatures rise – to an AfDB-financed programme backed by US$134 million, contributing to a sharp expansion in wheat area over two years. The point is not only that the varieties worked. It is that someone built the bridge between science and investment......read on https://theconversation.com/the-world-has-the-science-to-transform-food-systems-the-next-frontier-is-scaling-it-282881