Meet the Scaling Coalition:

A new mechanism for tackling shared problems in scaling agrifood innovations in the Global South

On 23 April 2026, the Agriculture, Rural Development and Social Enterprises (ARDSE) Working Group of the Scaling Community of Practice (SCoP) hosted a “Meet the Scaling Coalition” session as part of the SCoP Annual Forum. The session introduced this newish partnership to ARDSE’s roughly 1,000 members, explained how it works, and invited participants to get involved.

What the Coalition is working to solve

When broadly taken up, scientific innovations in agriculture and food—often taking the form of new or improved technologies, practices, and policies—reliably generate strong returns. The problem is that most successful pilots of proven, research-based innovations never scale to their full potential.

Some of the constraints holding back wider adoption are shared across researchers, funders, and practitioners working in different organizations. The Scaling Coalition was founded in 2025 by five such organizations specifically to identify the biggest common hurdles to scaling agrifood innovations,and to work together to solve them.

What the Coalition is, and what it isn’t

Loraine Ronchi, global lead for scaling science, knowledge and innovation at the World Bank Group, opened the launch session by tracing the thinking behind the Coalition. Many things need to come together for an innovation to reach scale, she explained: “Science alone is not enough, money alone is not enough, and even a clear need is not enough. No single organization can solve every scaling challenge alone. So, what could a group of committed organizations do together?”

The answer was not another community of practice. A large community of scaling practitioners already existed in groups such as SCoP. What was missing, Ronchi said, was a workspace—an “action space”—to build a global scaling ecosystem to help proven agrifood innovations reach the people who need them most: smallholder farmers.

The Coalition’s founders were equally clear about what the Coalition does not do. It does not:

• Solve specific scaling problems for individual projects or organizations
• Run a funding platform or fund unilateral or bilateral scaling projects
• Operate as a new, exclusive, or fixed community of practice

Instead, the Coalition creates a space where organizations facing a shared scaling problem can come together to solve it collectively.

How it started: mapping the scaling ecosystem

Marc Schut, a CGIAR Innovation Portfolio Management advisor and Wageningen University scientist, described how the idea took shape. In early 2025, five founding organizations—CGIAR, FAO, the Gates Foundation, GIZ, and the World Bank Group—began discussions on what a coalition could look like, starting by mapping 13 functions of scaling ecosystems, from institutional reform and skills-sharing to networks, portfolios, and learning.

A live poll invited the participants in the online session to share their own priority scaling challenges. Their responses echoed many of the mapped functions—strategies, business models, value chains, demand and capacity—while also surfacing new topics such as navigating politics, sustaining funding, and aligning scaling work with country investment programs.

An earlier mapping exercise by the founding members had already pointed to two areas ripe for joint work, which became the Coalition’s first two Solution Groups.

Solution Groups: the Coalition’s operational engine

Solution Groups are where Coalition members roll up their sleeves together. Each operates in roughly six-month cycles, tackles a specific cross-organizational challenge, and has clear participation expectations—”not a talk shop,” as Schut put it, but a platform for action.

Solution Group 1: Data interoperability. The World Bank, FAO, and CGIAR recognized that each holds rich innovation data on systems that don’t talk to one another. The group mapped what data and tools exist and how best to translate and exchange information at sector level, producing a “Rosetta Stone” for interpreting different organizations’ scaling databases.

Solution Group 2: Capacity sharing. FAO, GIZ, and CGIAR are building an inventory of currently fragmented capacity-sharing tools, identifying overlaps and gaps. A major gap already identified is that, while field practitioners are well served, actors controlling financing, policy, and institutional change are largely overlooked.

How the Coalition is structured

At the launch event, Michael Duerr, a GIZ program manager, walked participants through the governance and engagement model. SCoP’s ARDSE agriculture group acts as a “reservoir” of potential Solution Group members, he said, with the Coalition providing a co-chair to this SCoP group, linking the two communities.

Each Solution Group nominates a Focal Point, who convenes meetings, manages outputs, and reports to an Advisory Committee, which provides strategic guidance and reviews proposals for new Solution Groups. A small Secretariat and Communications function round out the structure. The Coalition has no budget and employs no staff, it runs on in-kind contributions from participating organizations.

Duerr emphasized several guiding principles: Our organizational model is light, pragmatic, and still evolving; participation is commitment-based; and engagement is organizational, not individual. The Advisory Committee currently comprises the 5 founding members but is expected to grow to 7–10 members with the addition of members from countries of the South and from donor agencies.

How to get involved

There are two ways in.

Join an existing Solution Group. Contact the relevant Focal Points—for Data Interoperability, Delgermaa.Chuluunbaatar [at] fao.org; for Capacity Sharing, raja.albers [at] giz.de. Interested organizations then complete an online form and confirm they can attend more than half of the meetings and contribute roughly 3–6 days of expertise per year.

Propose a new Solution Group. Identify a collective scaling challenge that no single organization can solve alone, team up with others facing the same problem, and submit a proposal through the Coalition’s online form. The Advisory Committee reviews proposals on a rolling basis. New groups operate in roughly six-month cycles, with a Focal Point committing around 8–15 days per year.

A live poll conducted in this session found that around 45% of participants would be interested in joining an existing Solution Group, with Capacity Sharing drawing the most interest (about 33%), and 38% would consider proposing a new Solution Group. Suggested topics included financial flows, evidence and impact assessment, working with governments and public extension services, and business models for sustainable scaling.

Q&A discussion

The Q&A discussion that followed the three presentations raised practical points, including that Coalition outputs will be shared primarily through SCoP, alongside the Coalition’s website, events, and webinars, and that the impact of those outputs will be tracked over time and shared, again largely through SCoP.

What’s next

The Coalition’s work will be in the spotlight again at CGIAR’s annual Scaling Week, to be held 22–24 September 2026 at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) in Nairobi, Kenya. You are warmly invited to go online both to register for that Week and to help shape this year’s agenda

More information: www.scalingcoalition.org or info@scalingcoalition.org.

The presenter profiles, video recording, transcript, and slides from the April 2026 “Meet the Scaling Coalition” session of the SCoP Annual Forum are all available on the SCoP website here.