Scaling CSA Interventions in East Africa through the CRAFT Project

Scaling up innovations to ‘achieve impact at scale’ has garnered enormous interest amongst development actors, researchers, donors, and governments as an effective strategy to generate wider benefits from development investments. Although scaling efforts often focus on the delivery of specific technologies and practices, successful interventions also continuously engage contextual and relational factors that influence the spread or adoption of innovations, including economic incentives, policy objectives, and social learning.

The Climate Resilient Agribusiness for Tomorrow (CRAFT) Project (2018-2023) promotes a private-sector/market-driven scaling approach to increase the availability and accessibility of climate smart agriculture (CSA) innovations to promote resilient food systems in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. Specifically, CRAFT supports economically competitive agribusiness SMEs and farmer cooperative through a co-investment process where these business champions will facilitate the delivery of selected CSA innovations to the project’s smallholder farmer beneficiaries. Thus, what is being scale in the CRAFT project is not only a variety of CSA technologies and practices, but a set of business and transactional arrangements in particular value chains and industries that can help stimulate, enable, and propel the adoption, use, management, and sustainability of the CSA innovations.

To date, CRAFT has supported over 40 SME agri-business champions to facilitate access to CSA products, services, and reliable markets for nearly 240, 000 smallholder farmers in East Africa. The delivery of these innovations and services is accompanied by climate risk assessments, CSA extension and training workshops, contract agreement with farmers, and the digitization of bundled CSA services. These efforts are likely to exceed the project’s scaling ambitions to deliver impact on increasing adoption of CSA innovations among some 300, 000 entrepreneurial smallholder farmers; supporting the business development of 50 agribusiness SMEs and 30 farmer cooperatives; and increasing the land area under climate resilient sustainable production by 600, 000 hectares.

Achieving significant and lasting impact at scale in all these areas, including beyond project boundaries, however, requires engaging with broader system level dynamics (rules, policies, institutions, etc.) to create an enabling environment for CSA innovations to go to scale. As such, CRAFT will also engage in strategic networking and collaboration with relevant local stakeholders to help overcome potential barriers that proposed CSA interventions may face. For instance, contextual research analysis and consultation with three project country teams found significant systemic barriers related to the availability and accessibility to a range of good-quality seeds that are well adapted to various climatic stresses. Through policy engagement and advocacy efforts, CRAFT will seek to work collaboratively with locally based partners to strengthen the functionality of multiple seeds systems, including increasing the supply of Quality Declared Seeds, to offer a wide range of crops and seed varieties of acceptable quality that can reach farmers, no matter how remote, stressed, or poor they may be in a timely manner.