Introduction

The Scaling Community of Practice (SCoP) launched a Mainstreaming Strategic Initiative nearly 2 ½ years ago to study the extent to which international development funders have integrated scaling into their operations. Its goals were to: (i) identify how much progress has been made in mainstreaming scaling; (ii) determine the primary drivers of those efforts; (iii) assess the extent to which mainstreaming integrated good scaling principles and practices; and (iv) derive lessons learned about good mainstreaming practices that could be applied by other donors interested in integrating scaling into their work. 

As of this writing in April 2025, fifteen studies have been published and can be found on the SCoP website. An additional ten are expected by June 2025, including a number of case studies of private foundations that have mainstreamed scaling. During the mid-point of this strategic initiative, the SCoP published an Interim Synthesis Report of its findings and lessons regarding mainstreaming, based on the case studies available as of Spring 2024. 

Six of the studies to date have been on organizations operating in the agri-food sector. The paper is based primarily on a review of case studies of the CGIAR, HarvestPlus, International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture (SFSA) and two case studies of USAID’s Feed the Future (FTF) program; one is an overview of the whole program and the other focuses on FTF’s Agricultural Innovation Laboratories (FTFIL). The purpose of this study is to compare the experience of those organizations with that of the larger sample and see to what extent their experience is similar or different. Where helpful, additional information was accessed to supplement or reinforce a key point.

Methodology and Enabling Factors

The methodology used in this paper had two parts. First, the author reviewed several papers by the SCoP to establish a set of criteria or enabling factors and good scaling practices (see Box 1 below) that would be compared between the agri-food case studies and the overall sample. Having established those enabling factors, the author reviewed all of the case studies and assessed the extent to which the role these factors played in the agri-food cases was similar or different from those in the non-agri-food cases. Unless otherwise stated, general insights and specific examples from agri-food funders are drawn from their respective case studies; for the sake of brevity a footnote is not provided for those references. Where helpful, additional information was accessed to supplement or reinforce a key point.

Box 1. Mainstreaming Enabling Factors and Good Scaling Practices Mainstreaming enabling factors  Senior leadership driving mainstreaming Other drivers of mainstreaming Inclusion of scale/scaling into organizational mission, goals and strategy Definition of scaling – whether or not it is transformational  Integration of Scaling into culture & incentives Internal organizational resources to support scaling  Operational instruments, policies and practices  Analytical tools, learning and knowledge Monitoring, evaluation, accountability and learning (MEAL Good Scaling Practices Scalability criteria into project/grant design, review and implementation Partnerships with other funders Funders as Intermediaries Localization System Change

 

Paper Organization

The rest of this paper is split into three sections. Sections II and III look at the above enabling factors and good scaling practices, respectively, one at a time. For each factor and practice, the paper briefly describes what that factor is, how the experience of agri-food funders is similar or different to that of other funders and illustrates this with specific examples from agri-food funders. In Section IV, the paper concludes with a summary of the similarities and differences of the agri-food sector.

 

Enabling Factors Affecting Whether and How Scaling is Mainstreamed

Leadership Driving Mainstreaming

The Interim Synthesis paper found that senior leadership was the single most important factor in driving mainstreaming within a funder organization. It is defined as the extent to which the head of a funder provided leadership in driving mainstreaming, such as introducing scaling into its mission, goals and strategy, providing ongoing support and championing mainstreaming as scaling an organizational priority. 

Senior leadership of all the agri-food funders emerged as the most significant driver of mainstreaming efforts, as was the case with funders from other sectors. SFSA, FTF, and HarvestPlus are excellent examples of the importance of key senior leadership for mainstreaming. The particular success of mainstreaming efforts at SFSA can be largely attributed to the long-term focus from the top of the organization (as well as its small size); when its most recent Executive Director assumed the position he put scaling at the center of the organization’s work. As compared to larger organizations, consistent, concerted efforts by senior leadership in smaller funders may be sufficient to drive mainstreaming due to their greater ability to affect the entire organization.

The ongoing mainstreaming efforts at IFAD are a useful window into the centrality of top management in enabling and driving the integration of scaling across a larger organization. IFAD initiated its mainstreaming efforts in earnest in the late 2000’s following several years of preliminary work on integrating scaling into the organization’s work. This was done at the initiative of the Associate Vice-President (AVP), who continually championed scaling during his tenure. After substantial progress through the early 2010’s, and the departure of the AVP in 2014, new senior leadership didn’t prioritize scaling. This resulted in less attention being given to scaling for several years; they were only resumed with the return of a scaling-focused president in 2022. The IFAD experience illustrates that mainstreaming, as with scaling itself, is a long-term process, and needs to retain ongoing and sustained leadership to make progress.

Other Drivers of Mainstreaming

The Interim Synthesis report found that in addition to senior leadership other drivers can also be important. These include pressure from governance bodies; in the case of INGOs and innovation organizations, pressure from donors; and the results of internal or external evaluations. 

Our review found that pressure from funders has been significant in some of the agri-food funders. For instance, CGIAR’s increased attention to scaling in the late 2000’s was largely driven by pressure from funders in the wake of the global food crisis of 2007-2008. The US government, World Bank and Gates Foundation (among the five largest funders) began to demand a greater emphasis from the CGIAR on taking innovations to scale, rather than just research and development of new technologies and innovations. This pressure increased as funding for the CGIAR nearly doubled between 2007 and 2014, and donors felt they were not seeing the hoped-for results on the ground. This pressure for visible and concrete impact at scale, along with expectations of greater efficiency, led the CGIAR to launch a major institutional reform process in roughly 2016 that is ongoing. A major part of this reform effort – the One CGIAR process — included mainstreaming scaling, stating that the CGIAR would: “… participate in innovation systems to contribute to impact at scale.” This provided an opportunity for the Innovation Package and Scaling Readiness tool developed by several research staff to be scaled internally.

A similar trend emerged at USAID’s Feed the Future (FTF) Innovation Laboratories. So called “Labs” were located in major US research universities and received well over a billion dollars in funding over the past fifteen years, starting in 2010. By 2015 senior management within the Bureau for Resilience and Food Security (BRFS) asked staff what impact at scale had been achieved, and the answer was disappointing. This source of pressure was reinforced by the fact that BRFS was also monitoring some indicators on the ground, such as average age of seed varieties being planted by small farmers. Once again, the results were unsatisfactory.

Demand from Boards and findings from evaluations have been less influential. Interestingly enough, in those cases where evaluations have flagged (poor) performance on scaling (e.g. IFAD), the operational side of organizations have been slow to address the implications of those findings; evaluators are often seen as a critical, external force that doesn’t fully understand what is involved on the operational side. On the other hand, at least in the IFAD case, the continued focus on scaling by IFAD’s funders during Replenishment negotiations helped sustain the issue during the period of backsliding. On the whole, these trends match those seen in the non-agri-food case studies as well. 

Other agri-food funders, including HarvestPlus and the Syngenta Foundation, indicated that the growing importance of scaling to donors created implicit pressure to focus more on projects that incorporate scaling. None of the case studies found that pressure from recipient countries was a meaningful factor in inducing a focus on scaling despite a substantial emphasis on localization.

Integrating Scale into Organizational Mission, Goals and Strategy 

Explicitly incorporating scaling into an organization overall mission, goals and strategy is an important step in mainstreaming. It provides a framework for changes in internal operations, funding priorities and other modifications. (It is important to note that there are funders in which mainstreaming has advanced without that foundation, e.g. GIZ, and the Swiss Agency for Cooperation and Development (SDC)). 

Most of the agri-food funders incorporated scaling into strategic documents, with some of the organizations also laying out scaling-specific goals. In fact, of all the donors studied, most of the organizations that have made explicit goals for scaling were agri-food funders; funders in other sectors did not have such targets. One example is HarvestPlus, which set forth the goal of reaching one billion consumers with nutrient-enriched food by 2030. The CGIAR’s new Scaling for Impact program targets 65 million people in 17 focus countries. That said, it is important to note that successful scaling is not measured only in terms of the numbers of people or places reached, narrow technical impact on the challenge being addressed, or sustainability; Optimal Scale also includes other factors like inclusion, gender equity and equity generally.

Focus on Transformational Scaling

An important distinction in how organizations define or approach scaling in practice emerged in the course of the mainstreaming strategic initiative. This distinction is between transactional versus transformational scaling (it was first proposed by the authors of the Syngenta Foundation case study). For many funders, scaling is about increasing the number of projects or the amount of funding or both, i.e., more or bigger transactions. Transformational scaling may include more funding or bigger projects, but its primary objective is achieving long-term, sustainable impact that extends beyond project end rather than money disbursed, project completed, internal project goals met. It involves a shift in focus to scaling goals that are aligned with local priorities (see the discussion of localization below), sustainability, and, most importantly, target impact commensurate with the size of the problem or total need. By comparison transactional scaling only targets whatever scale can be achieved by project or grant end with given resources. The transformational approach is crucial for mainstreaming because it targets scaling and creates lasting impact and results in sustainable development, its goals are commensurate to the problem or challenge being addressed, and, in service of the first two, incorporates systems changes and optimal scale, i.e., requires consideration of equity, inclusion, etc. 

Fortunately, there has been growing recognition of the need for focus on transformational scaling among the studied agri-food funders, with a smaller number having implemented these changes. In general, it appears that smaller funders and those that primarily or exclusively fund innovations have made more progress towards transformational scaling principles into their work. In the case of agri-food funders, SFSA demonstrated a strong commitment to transformational scaling evident in its strategic vision, focus on partnerships and capacity building, and efforts to influence policy and regulatory frameworks. This is also true for the CGIAR and HarvestPlus (a part of the CGIAR network), who have incorporated transformational scaling principles in their organizational discourse without explicitly using the phrase “transformational scaling.” FTFILs are starting to focus on this as well. IFAD’s scaling framework also represents a transformational approach, even as implementation in practice retains often a transactional project focus. 

Integration of Scaling into Culture & Incentives

Mainstreaming scaling is greatly facilitated by a shift in organizational culture and incentives. One of the findings of the entire set of case studies is that mainstreaming can be challenging to implement because of inertia or even resistance from middle management and staff. Resistance often comes because scaling is introduced on top of too many unfunded cross-cutting themes; e.g., gender, climate change, youth, without the incremental resources – specifically staff time — to implement the additional work. It is de facto an “unfunded mandate”. In this context, even sustained efforts by senior leadership can have limited impact on actual implementation, risking more of a check-the-box mentality. 

This is one area in which most of the larger case study funders have made limited progress, although smaller funders like Grand Challenges Canada have been able to change their culture. Several of the agri-food funders did make progress – HarvestPlus, SFSA, the CGIAR and FTFIL. In fact, in some of these smaller organizations changes in culture and attitude went a long way towards implementation even when formal tools, guidance or staff incentives were lacking. At SFSA, organizational culture strongly encourages and centers around scaling, although this is not accompanied by tools and incentives. HarvestPlus is a similar example of fully integrating scaling into organizational culture. HarvestPlus was specifically designed with scaling as a goal — widespread adoption of various bio-fortified agricultural and food products. Scaling has been a core part of its culture since inception and is an intrinsic part of decision making at all levels. In both HarvestPlus and SFSA, staff and middle management have very much taken up scaling in how they design and implement innovations.

The CGIAR as a whole has been rolling out its Innovation Package and Scaling Readiness (IPSR) framework and has explicitly embraced the need to change organizational culture. Initially they approached this through a “coalition of the willing”, i.e. early adopters, who are eager to try something new. More recently, the CGIAR’s S4I program is taking steps to develop scaling competence throughout most of the fifteen individual centers and expects this to help align its internal culture with its transformational scaling goals. It has not yet integrated scaling goals into center, division or staff KPIs, or advancement criteria. Buy in by middle management and staff is quite variable across various centers; according to key informants, there is much greater buy in among scientists and staff under forty-years old and in centers that had embedded scaling advisors which includes CIMMYT, HarvestPlus, IIRA, ILRI and IWMI (part of a Scaling Agricultural Innovations Taskforce program funded by GIZ).

Despite successes at these relatively smaller funders, larger agri-food funders such as IFAD and the FTF initiative continue to struggle to integrate scaling throughout the organization’s culture as front-line staff have insufficient resources and support for implementing systematic scaling approaches. Both organizations have made efforts to assimilate scaling into all levels of the organization, although they have yet to yield much progress.

While the focus of senior leadership and shifts in organizational discourse towards scaling are an integral part of mainstreaming, in order for these efforts to penetrate the entire organization middle management and frontline staff must also shift their focus towards scaling. Not only is this buy-in an indicator of successful mainstreaming, but it is also a key step towards ensuring the longevity of these efforts. 

Agri-food funders demonstrate a similar degree of progress in this regard as compared to funders in other sectors, with a divide appearing between smaller and larger organizations. For instance, many IFAD staff treated scaling as a check-the-box exercise. Smaller organizations, such as HarvestPlus and the Syngenta Foundation, have shown greater success in securing the buy-in of middle management and frontline staff. This may be because of the outsized influence that leadership can play in such organizations, with focused drives towards scaling and strong messaging from upper management being enough to overcome organizational inertia. Indeed, both HarvestPlus and Syngenta Foundation were designated as funders in which scaling has become intrinsic to the organization.

Educating staff on scaling has been one approach of larger organizations to secure their engagement in mainstreaming efforts. CGIAR has invested significantly in awareness-building campaigns and training programs to familiarize staff with scaling and the IPSR tool. Incorporating scaling-related goals into whole-of-organization performance indicators, embedding scaling into strategic documents, and the formation of a central unit (PPU) focused on scaling have helped to integrate scaling into all levels of the organization. However, CGIAR’s approach is still in its early days and is taking a gradual approach. While scaling is increasingly mandatory and mainstreamed for centrally funded projects (CGIAR funding is split between centralized funding (around 30-40% of total) versus funding that goes directly to specific centers or programs), it is largely voluntary on the part of different centers for the rest of their work and buy-in is highly variable across individual centers. Since the writing of the case study, the CGIAR has developed and approved a five-year $216 million Scaling for Impact (S4I) program to simultaneously integrate scaling throughout the organization and implement scaling in 17 focus countries. S4I is just starting in 2025, and the results remain to be seen. 

Internal organizational resources to support scaling

Dedicated organizational, technical, and budgetary resources are usually necessary for mainstreaming scaling. This means key personnel e.g. designing and implementing projects, reviewing and approving grant applications – need to have toolkits, criteria and guidance to follow and training in how to use them, potentially with technical support to back them up. Some organizations have delegated the task of technical support for scaling to a centralized unit, while others have chosen to train embedded scaling experts throughout the organization. 

Agri-food funders appear to have a similar level of organizational resources devoted to supporting scaling compared to other sectors, noting as above that in smaller organizations changes in culture and commitment can do much to at least qualitatively integrate scaling. The Syngenta Foundation is an interesting example of successful mainstreaming. Although it doesn’t mention scaling explicitly in its organizational strategy and other documents, scaling is a clear priority in the design and implementation of its projects and their evaluation. This indicates the importance of making scaling a priority in project planning and implementation, and ensuring the organizational culture is focused on creating sustainable impact at scale. Once an organization reaches this point, it seems that, at least for smaller organizations, changes in organizational culture can go a long way even without formal tools and guidance in mainstreaming.

For larger agri-food organizations, the CGIAR is a notable exception as it has, as noted above, provided substantial internal support through training and a network of internal experts. IFAD has also provided some support with guidance provided by its Policy and Technical Advisory Division within its Programme Management Directorate, as well as questions and criteria that have been integrated throughout the project cycle, as discussed below.

Organizational instruments, policies, and practices

The core of operationalizing scaling is to put in place financial policies, policies and procedures and preferably dedicated funding to support scaling. Policies and procedures include integrating scalability criteria into project/grant preparation, design, selection, and approval, as well as monitoring and evaluation during implementation and after completion (the latter discussed separately below).

The principal challenge in terms of policies is the duration of the grant or loan. International experience shows that scaling takes 10-15 years or even longer, and yet most donor projects or grants have a duration of five years or less. While some donors have in place multi-phase or programmatic instruments that in principal allow for longer maturities more aligned with steps and duration of scaling, often these are implemented in ways that are similar to short-term instruments. 

Across all sectors, some innovation funders provide grants early on and later provide other forms of funding (including results-based funding) to more effectively support the scaling of projects. GCC has a Transition to Scale fund. Those small organizations that have mainstreamed scaling such as HarvestPlus or GCC, regardless of sector, have integrated it into their grants and projects and have moved towards multi-phase funding. Even when they don’t have funding for scaling themselves beyond transition to scale, they have sought out external grants to add to their financial resources and found or facilitated scaling partnerships. SFSA and HarvestPlus are good examples of this, and this is a goal of the CGIAR S4I program.

In terms of integrating scaling into grant/project cycles, all of the agri-food funders have integrated scaling. A good example is IFAD. It developed a short set of scaling points to be addressed in its project design and Quality Assurance (QA) and Quality Enhancement (QE) processes. Its 2019 Scaling Up Framework encourages teams to assess scalability from the outset, including enabling environments, institutional capacity, financing mechanisms, and partnerships. IFAD’s QE and QA review processes now include explicit references to scaling readiness and potential. These reviews assess whether the proposed innovations are scalable and if enabling conditions (e.g., policy support, institutional partnerships) are in place. However, scalability is not always a formal approval criterion, though it is influential. Integrating scaling criteria, guidance and review doesn’t necessarily translate fully into implementation; while IFAD clearly has made significant progress in incorporating scaling criteria into the project cycle, for many country teams it still remains more of a ‘check the box’ exercise. 

At HarvestPlus, good scaling practices have been deeply incorporated into planning processes, influencing the entire project cycle from the initial selection of issues to address through project design and implementation. Their Biofortification Priority Index reflects the degree of production and consumption of a potential biofortified crop in a given country, as well as the deficiency level for the micronutrient with which that crop can be enriched. This is a perfect example of how organizations can include scaling as an early consideration which permits a more effective allocation of resources.

Both the CGIAR’s IPSR and the new S4I program use a sequential or stage gating approach to innovation and scaling, integrating scalability criteria at each stage, especially decisions as to whether an innovation is ready for scaling (thus Scaling Readiness), and if not, what would need to be done in terms of modifying the innovation itself, the innovation package, or relevant systems to achieve readiness. I2i which was designed to be used by FTFIL, uses a similar approach. It is too soon to assess whether this will have the intended impact in the CGIAR and FTFILs have been eliminated, but the early pilots of i2i with FTFILs were very promising. 

Localization and Decentralization 

The case studies show that almost all funders acknowledge the importance of local context and ownership for effective scaling, i.e., localization. Many emphasize the need for staff to possess a deep understanding of local dynamics, needs, and stakeholder preferences. One of the primary ways localizations can be achieved is via decentralization, i.e., opening local offices, relocating staff to existing local country or regional offices, or giving greater autonomy over decision making to such offices. While decentralization can facilitate mainstreaming through a better grasp of local contexts, political priorities and the cultivation of long-term relationships with local stakeholders, the increased autonomy of country offices can also hinder organization-wide adoption and implementation of a consistent scaling approach. Moreover, a local presence doesn’t in all cases always translate into a greater, empowered role for national stakeholders.

Compared to the other case studies, the agri-food funders demonstrated a much greater level of decentralization and localization. Almost all of the agri-food funders – IFAD, CGIAR, HarvestPlus, Syngenta, USAID FTF — have staff in-country with varying levels of autonomy. For USAID, prior to recent events, mainstreaming through agri-food projects has faced challenges due to scaling being at the discretion of individual country missions which have substantial autonomy and control over their own budgets. This demonstrates how decentralization can pose a challenge to mainstreaming efforts and reemphasizes the need for an organization wide approach as well winning the support of middle-management for successful mainstreaming. 

The Syngenta Foundation has done much to involve end users and commercial producers and distributors in the design of its interventions. SFSA offices in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia and Kenya were able to leverage their local presence to create close partnerships with local actors that allowed for hand-off and progress along the scaling pathway. The same can be said for IFAD, which has substantially decentralized in the last fifteen years; the evidence shows that countries where IFAD has a local office perform better on evaluations of scaling performance. While the CGIAR has had a longstanding country presence of many of its Centers, most often these were partnerships and relationships with other research organizations similar to those of FTFILs. In its new S4I, the CGIAR is now putting localization at the center of its scaling efforts; its entire strategy centers on greater engagement, involvement and partnership with a diverse local stakeholders and donor projects scale the agri-food innovations developed by its researchers.

Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning

Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning (MEAL) is crucial to scaling. Evidence on various aspects of scalability e.g. costs, comparative efficacy with other solutions to the same challenge, local demand, is critical for making decisions as to what, whether and how to scale. MEAL is essential to monitor scaling itself and to make evidence-based decisions on changes in strategy and activities using an adaptive, iterative approach. Finally, MEAL that looks at the success of scaling efforts – whether they have resulted in sustainable impact at scale — facilitates invaluable institutional learning and improved approaches to what is funded and scaling strategies and pathways. 

Agri-food funders have made more progress in incorporating scaling into MEAL than many of the other case studies. GCC and GFF, which both fund health innovations and scaling, have focused primarily on evaluating project outcomes, disbursements, and outputs achieved in terms of scale but not in a more comprehensive way. By contrast, most of the agri-food funders have made significant progress on integrating scaling into MEAL for and of scaling; the CGIAR, USAID’s FTFIL, HarvestPlus and IFAD have all done so. In addition to using RCTs to determine the efficacy of Orange Fleshed Sweet Potatoes (which are high in Vitamin A), HarvestPlus used evidence to support scaling. Given its comprehensive nature, it is worth describing at length to illustrate the multi-dimensional uses of evidence for scaling as found in Box 2 below.

Box 2. HarvestPlus use of MEAL to support scaling Data on micronutrient deficiencies, agricultural systems, and policy readiness helped identify priority countries for scaling (e.g., India, Nigeria, Bangladesh) Economic evaluations were used to show that biofortification is cost-effective compared to other nutritional interventions, especially in rural, low-income populations. This evidence has been crucial in convincing governments and donors to support large-scale deployment. A “test and adapt” approach resulted in a shift from direct delivery to leveraging public and private sector partnerships for wider reach. In many cases, after success with direct implementation in pilot countries, HarvestPlus shifted to a market-based scaling model, using agribusiness and government channels. Adoption research assessed consumer preferences, willingness to pay, and farmer uptake, showing that biofortified crops can be mainstreamed without sacrificing yield or taste. Gender-disaggregated data have been especially useful in refining delivery strategies to reach women and children more effectively. Market assessments and pilot distribution models allowed HarvestPlus to understand how to integrate biofortified crops into existing agricultural and food systems. This informed adjustments like bundling seeds with extension services or targeting institutional buyers (e.g., school feeding programs). Evidence on policy environments and regulatory frameworks has guided country-specific strategies for mainstreaming biofortified crops into national agriculture and nutrition plans. Evidence of positive outcomes helped mainstream biofortification into government seed systems, breeding programs, and nutrition policies—essential for sustainable scaling. Impact evidence supported advocacy efforts to influence donors, policymakers, and multilaterals like the World Bank and IFAD to fund and prioritize scaling of biofortified products. In sum, HarvestPlus used consumer studies to understand acceptance and demand, economic evaluations to estimate cost-effectiveness, implementation evaluations to improve delivery and scaling strategies, policy analyses to effect government support and donor engagement, monitoring to track reach, adoption and outcomes, and gender/social research to ensure inclusivity and equitable scaling.

IFAD has also done much to integrate scaling into MEAL. IFAD’s Office of Independent Evaluation regularly assesses the extent to which IFAD projects and country strategies are achieving scale as part of its broader evaluations.  Some of the criteria it employs are: (i) whether a project has piloted scalable innovations; (ii) relevance, such as are innovations aligned with national priorities; (iii) context – has the project(s) created enabling environments for scale; and (iv) whether IFAD has taken concrete steps toward scaling through partnerships, financing, or institutional changes. Particularly points (iii) and (iv) with their focus on systems and continued scaling beyond project end are strong examples of good scaling practice.

It is important to note that integrating scaling into evaluations of impact at scale presents challenges for innovation funders in general, whether in health like GCC or the CGIAR in agri-food. This is because of their small funding size and the fact that they don’t funding scaling itself; the results stage of their projects occur beyond the end of their own engagements. Combined with their often limited presence on the ground, it is even more difficult for them to track ex-post impact than even time-limited donor projects; major donors often have an ongoing presence in a given country or region, even if they choose not to leverage that for long-term tracking of impact at scale. Indeed, CGIAR depends on information from its country partners, primarily National Agricultural Research and Extension Services (NARES), which leads to highly variable quality and reliability depending on their capacity and political incentives.

 

Incorporating Good Scaling Practices into Mainstreaming

The focus of this report has been on the current state of mainstreaming and its key enabling factors. While some of those factors are also good scaling practices, the paper shifts to assessing progress funders have made in integrating good scaling practices not covered above. 

Partnerships with other funders

Collaboration, cooperation and partnership between funders is essential for scaling. Even for funders who use a transactional conception of scaling, co-financing with partners is core to their approach. Co-financing allows them to mobilize a greater sum of funds for a particular project and results in larger projects. Partnerships are even more essential to transformational scaling. Greater resources allow for investments in strengthening enabling environments and market systems, addressing constraints and obstacles to scale and sustainability. Partnerships facilitate hand-off from one funder to another along the scaling pathway, particularly critical for innovation funders or those with limited financial resources. Partnerships with local public or private actors are essential for long-term sustainability and impact at scale as opposed to transactional partnerships. But it is also important to recognize that developing and sustaining partnerships is not costless in terms of management and staff time, dilution of brand, and potential risks of non-delivery on commitments by partners. 

Most of the case studies across all sectors recognize cooperation with other funders as a key component for achieving successful scaling. However, partnerships are generally limited to collaboration on specific projects. Mainstreaming longitudinal partnerships are much more difficult to form, especially with local governments or the private sector. HarvestPlus, though, actively coordinates its efforts with a wide range of organizations to facilitate scaling biofortification from innovation to large-scale implementation. It operates across the entire scaling spectrum and has been able to achieve great success because of its local partnerships.

Smaller organizations have demonstrated great interest in partnerships with larger funders, especially those who fund innovations and need to hand off to others to go beyond transition to scale to full-blown scaling and institutionalization. However, while many such funders find partners to advance further along scaling pathways, this can be limited by a time-bounded project focus. In this regard, the Syngenta Foundation has been successful in finding transactional partners, but less so in finding transformational ones. Partnerships are at the core of the CGIAR’s S4I program as it also as a research and innovation doesn’t itself do scaling. It has targeted convening, organizing and facilitating partnerships projects – working as an intermediary — with existing donors and donor as well as national governments and the private sector, to achieve sustainable impact at scale. Whether this proves to be successful will be seen over the next five years.

Funders as intermediaries

Acting as an intermediary is crucial in bridging the gap between innovation/small funders and large funders who can further advance scaling. Intermediaries help with finding champions, convening stakeholders, packaging investments, providing scaling advice, and identifying policy and regulatory obstacles. For scaling to succeed, donors need to either act as intermediaries or support other organizations or country platforms to do so. The lack of intermediaries and/or funding for them or that role is a primary reason for the infamous “valley-of-death” between innovation and scaling.

Many innovation funders have taken to funding the transition to scale phase, which works to prepare an organization or innovation for scaling such as by doing market studies and estimating demand, building advocacy capacity within a social enterprise, or developing cost data and a viable business/funding model. A relatively higher portion of agri-food funders have taken on at least some of the intermediary role. The Syngenta Foundation works to identify demand-driven solutions, develop viable business models, and recruit public and private sector actors to support the delivery of innovations. Additionally, SFSA provides technical expertise and support to its partners, helping them to build capacity, scale solutions, and transition to commercially viable market-based models. 

HarvestPlus, which functions as an intermediary for the entire innovation to sustainable scale pathway, is probably the best example among the case studies of how to fill the intermediary role – it was built into the original design. Building on that model, a major pillar of the CGIAR’s S4I program is to play this intermediary role; organizing and facilitating partnerships, doing advocacy and mobilizing financing. IFAD also works to ensure scaling of its projects with its national government and other partners, though the extent varies by project and country.

Systems Change for Scaling

Systems change is a vital complement to scaling; assessments of scalability should focus on identifying systemic constraints and scaling efforts need to somehow address those constraints. While smaller projects may have the resources to manage obstacles at a local or pilot level, scaling to national or regional levels inevitably confronts systemic challenges such as public policy environments, implementation capacity, availability of fiscal space and resources, and missing or weak market system and value chain institutions. Addressing these issues, including social norms and beliefs, takes substantial time, effort and resources which increases exponentially with the depth and breadth of the change required. This is usually beyond the resources of small funders, and even for larger funders can take longer than the average 3-5 year project duration, requiring follow-up projects.

All of the agri-food funders recognize the need for systems change. In general, though, agri-food funders appear to have struggled more than other funders in addressing systems change. This finding, however, may be the result of the higher proportion of smaller agri-food funders, given their limited resources. Syngenta, for example, demonstrates its commitment to systems change through its systems-thinking approach, strategic partnerships, and policy engagement. However, its resource limitations lead it to rely on partnerships to work towards meaningful change. 

The CGIAR and IFAD, which have the most resources, have correspondingly done the most to address systemic challenges. As noted under the MEAL section above, IFAD has at the core of its projects policy engagement, partnership strategies, and a focus on institutional capacity building. However, even this larger organization is hamstrung by limited resources, an overloaded workforce, and inconsistent attention to scaling in project design and implementation. Historically the CGIAR’s work on systems change has been limited to policy advice and capacity building of NARES. However, the new S4I project has made systems change one of its core five pillars, as it is key to Scaling Readiness. 

 

Conclusions

In several dimensions, agri-food funders and innovation/research organizations have done more to integrate scaling into their work than the organizations working in other sectors represented in the mainstreaming strategic initiative, with the exception of health. This may in part be a result of selection bias or a limited sample, however one of the reasons that agri-food (and health) are well represented in the sample is that there has been a lot of mainstreaming in those two sectors in the last fifteen years. Box 3 below summarizes how the agri-food sector compares to the rest of the case studies in terms of the topics covered in this paper.

Table 1. Summary of Agri-Food Sector Mainstreaming

Topic	Absolute Role or Extent of Mainstreaming in the Agri-Food Sector	Compared to the Rest of the Sample (L – low, M – moderate, H – high)	Explainable by small size or innovation focus
Leadership as a Driver	Critical	Largely similar	Significant
Other Drivers	Donor/Board pressure important	More important (CRS – M, CARE – M, GCC – H, GIZ L, GFF – H, SOFF – M, IDB – L)	Somewhat, historical expectations of Green Revolution also relevant
Integrating into Organizational Mission, Goals and Strategy	High for most cases; “mission critical” for IFAD, core of SFSA mission	Much greater and less variable except for health sector (CRS – L, CARE – M, GCC – H, GIZ L, GFF – H, IDB – L, SOFF – H,)	Significant
Use of Transformational vs. Transactional Scaling	High for all cases; CGIAR, IFAD, SFSA, HarvestPlus and FTF/FTFIL	Much greater (CRS – L, CARE – L, GCC – H, GIZ L, GFF – M, IDB – L, SOFF – M)	?????
Internal organizational resources to support scaling	Uneven; high for CGIAR, SFSA and HarvestPlus, moderate for IFAD and FTFIL, FTF lowest	Greater except for the health sector (CRS – L, CARE – M, GCC – M, GIZ – L, GFF – M, IDB – L, SOFF – M)	?????
Organizational instruments, policies, and practices	High for most cases; CGIAR, IFAD, SFSA, HarvestPlus and FTFIL, not FTF	Much greater except for health sector (CRS – L, CARE – M, GCC – H, GIZ L, GFF – H, IDB – L, SOFF – M)	No
Localization and Decentralization	Uneven. High for HarvestPlus and SFSA; moderate for IFAD; historically low for FTFIL and CGIAR but major changes in progress	Similar variability (CRS – H, CARE – M, GCC – M, GIZ – H, GFF – M, IDB – L, SOFF – M)
Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning	High for HarvestPlus, IFAD and SFSA; moderate for FTF, historically low for FTFIL and CGIAR but major changes in progress	Much greater (CRS – L, CARE – L, GCC – M, GIZ – L, GFF – M, IDB – L, SOFF – M)	No
Partnerships with other funders	Uneven. High for HarvestPlus and SFSA; moderate for IFAD; historically low for FTFIL and CGIAR but major changes in progress	Similar variability (CRS – H, CARE – M, GCC – M, GIZ – L, GFF – H, SOFF – M, IDB – L)	Possible?
Funders as intermediaries	Uneven. High for HarvestPlus and SFSA; moderate for IFAD; historically low for CGIAR but major changes in progress; low for FTFIL	Somewhat greater (CRS – M, CARE – M, GCC – M, GIZ – L, GFF – H, SOFF – M, IDB – L)	Somewhat
Systems Change for Scaling	Uneven. High for HarvestPlus, FTF and IFAD; low for SFSA (size) and FTFIL; historically low for CGIAR but major changes in progress	Similar variability (CRS – M, CARE – M, GCC – L, GIZ – M, GFF – H, SOFF – H, IDB – M)	Yes, as other funders mostly much bigger

Looking at the specific topics covered in this study, it appears that pressure or expectations from their boards or funders was a more important motivation than with other funders. Again, much of this was baked into the reasons they were set up in the first place; HarvestPlus, FTFIL and the CGIAR generally were expected to develop innovations that achieved impact at scale. HarvestPlus, unlike the other two, was expected to drive the entire innovation to scale pathway. By contrast, the only innovation funder in other sectors was GCC.

Agri-food funders have made more progress in many areas of mainstreaming. A transformational approach to scale is much more common there, and is usually accompanied by investments in systems change, possibly for the reasons discussed above. However, investments in system change are constrained by the small size of several funders, SFSA and FTFIL simply lack the necessary resources. Scaling criteria have been integrated into agri-food funders project/grant/research designs and funding from the beginning or early on in most cases, even if in the case of SFSA that was more qualitative than based on specific criteria. Not surprisingly, this was mirrored in greater attention to scaling in their MEAL work, both generating evidence to support scaling and tracking progress in scaling. These funders tend to provide more internal support for scaling, as is witnessed by both the CGIAR’s S4I program and USAID’s investment in the development of the i2i tool. In terms of good scaling practices, agri-food funders tend to play more of an intermediary role than other funders while their use of partners is similar.

A significant part of greater progress in mainstreaming is likely attributable to the fact that many are smaller and involved in innovations; scaling expectations and pressure on innovation funders seems to be greater than those that fund and implement projects. The USAID case is instructive in that regard; USAID has made much more progress in integrating scaling into the FTFILs than into its country projects. 

It is important to state that the legacy of the Green Revolution and expectations of a repeat after the 2007-8 world food crisis likely played a role for in expectations of scaling. This was explicit for the CGIAR, Feed the Future and HarvestPlus and probably implicit in other funders. The Green Revolution legacy created a powerful archetype of success at scale, which strongly influenced donor expectations for FTF and CGIAR. That legacy translated into real institutional and political pressure to demonstrate scalable, transformative impact—especially in Africa. Thus, Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) was created in 2006 with the goal of triggering a new “Green Revolution” in Africa; the major funders and drivers were the Gates and the Rockefeller Foundations, the latter had been a major driver of the first Green Revolution. At the same time, both actors soon recognized that scaling, especially in the post-structural adjustment environment in Africa, is more complex: it’s about systems, equity, resilience—not just yields.

A second reason why more progress may have been made in agri-food is that there has been a steadily growing awareness of the importance of strengthening systems, in this case value chains and market systems over the last forty years. Again this is somewhat similar to the health sector which has also emphasized strengthening of health systems except that there has been more continued emphasis on a public sector role; in both sectors systems have been seen as critical for since the 2010s.

However, despite the relatively strong performance on mainstreaming scaling, agri-food funders need to continue to pursue the mainstreaming agenda proactively and monitor and evaluate progress on an ongoing basis. The Scaling Community of Practice developed a Mainstreaming Tracking Tool that can help these funder organizations in tracking progress over time in key mainstreaming dimensions.