SCALING UP IN AGRICULTURE, RURAL DEVELOPMENT, AND NUTRITION
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: Catalyzing Agricultural Innovation PRABHU PINGALI
Focus 19 • brIeF 16 • June 2012 T
he Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is a very recent entrant in the agricultural development space. We have been active
in this area for just over five years, yet we quickly became a major donor and advocate for smallholder agricultural development. Between the years 2006 and 2011, the Foundation invested close to US$2 billion to promote sustainable agricultural productivity growth, with a particular emphasis on Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The Foundation is currently among the top five donors providing grants for agricultural development in Sub-Saharan Africa and possibly the top source of public research and development (R&D) support for the region.
The Gates Foundation approach to scaling up agricultural innovation
Our approach to improving lives at scale embodies the concept of catalytic philanthropy, which seeks to identify market and government failures and address those gaps. Since our inception, we have focused on supporting the provision of international public goods and on catalyzing the invention of innovative, high-leverage solutions that other sectors can adopt, adapt, or otherwise use. For instance, we have invested in such critically important yet underfunded areas as agricultural R&D for food staples important to the developing world. But we recognize that upstream activities alone are not
enough to achieve transformative results. Our large investments at national and subnational levels reflect a comprehensive approach to helping farmers prosper. This includes helping them access new tools and farm management techniques, opening doors to markets, and supporting effective policies. For example, some of our strongest investments in Africa support increased farmer access to farm storage technologies, warehouse receipt systems, market information systems, and low-cost, small-to-medium-scale processing facilities, which together improve market infrastructure, increase value addition, and stimulate end uses. Through support for regional research networks focusing on agricultural economics, we also invest in individual countries’ capacities to analyze and better design policies to improve smallholder productivity and reduce poverty. Our approach to achieving impact is also not restricted to
large dollar investments. Focused advocacy, alliance building, and consensus-building interventions help create an environment that fosters success across our portfolio. For example, our insistence that women participate in and benefit from all our grants has resulted in widespread attention to women farmers as untapped economic agents, notably through reform efforts from the US Feed the Future initiative and the Consultative Group in International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).
Refining our approach
In 2011, we initiated a mid-course correction to our strategy, with the aim of becoming more effective in our ability to significantly
reduce hunger and poverty in our target regions: Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Our first four years of grant-making provided us with the following useful lessons that we used to recalibrate our work going forward.
1. Our grant-making, although substantial, was too diffuse to have widespread impact on the ground.
2. We lacked a clear pathway from global innovation to smallholder poverty reduction.
3. We were not well coordinated with contemporaneous efforts by governments, other donors, and development agencies along the chain from R&D to impact on farmers’ fields.
We have now embarked on a refreshed grant-making
strategy that tries to address these shortcomings. It places strong emphasis on three design principles: focus, integration, and partnership. By incorporating the full meaning of these principles in the reorganization of our work, we aim to move away from geographically dispersed boutiques of success, and toward integrated national models in which our portfolio can add up to more than the sum of its parts.
Sharper focus
Our resources are now more sharply focused on a set of priority commodities and a set of priority countries. Priority commodities are both crops and livestock products, and they are distinct for Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
Priority commodities
Our prioritization of commodities was based on (1) an assessment of the food consumption basket of the poor, (2) demand projections through 2030, (3) the current supply situation, (4) productivity gaps, and (5) market failures in technology generation, diffusion, and marketing. We settled on a set of staple food crops that are important to the poor and that are grown in 11 of the 14 agroecologies of Sub-Saharan Africa; they are widely adaptable and amenable to scaling up across regions. We excluded high-value crops even though we are fully aware of the pro-poor benefits of smallholder participation in high-value supply chains. We do not believe that there is an R&D market failure for high-value crops where the private sector is already active. The rapid spread of Bt cotton in India is an excellent example.
Priority countries
Our refreshed strategy also provides a much sharper geographic focus for our efforts. When we started our work in agricultural development, we chose to restrict ourselves to Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. However, we found that even that delineation was too broad and diffuse for us to have a transformative impact on the ground. We therefore decided to take to scale our efforts in a few priority countries and depend on spillover effects for reaching the rest. The country prioritization was based on three major criteria.
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