22 – 24 September 2026 · ILRI Campus, Nairobi
This is a community event: three headline sessions anchor it, and around them — six Open Space blocks, thirty-two sessions, a marketplace, a wellbeing tent — the week belongs to the people who turn up.
More about Scaling Week: events.cgiar.org/scalingweek2026
Download simplified program4 pages, PDF
The art of the ask
Rise
So what now?
Day 1
The art of the ask
Day 2
Rise
Day 3
So what now?
Thirty-two sessions across six blocks. Every one was proposed by the people running it, and the descriptions are their own words. Five parallel rooms in each block, plus one slot that stays open until the week itself fills it with an emerging theme.
Tuesday 22 September · 15:00 - 16:00
Come experience scaling in action! Explore lessons from three years of the CGIAR Scaling Fund, see how our partnership with Enabel is taking Scaling Readiness beyond CGIAR, and hear about our emerging work with WFP’s 2026 SAPA cohort. We will engage directly with innovation teams, donors, and scaling practitioners to understand what works, what remains challenging, and where we go next.
Five AI-supported scaling tools, five stages of maturity, one set of questions. Climate advisories, scaling strategies, enabling-environment analysis, adaptive toolkits, and scale-strengthen-sunset assessments - each answers what it solves, who it serves, and what it leaves to you. Then sit down with the ones that matter to your work.
Scaling Hubs hold real potential to close the gap between scaling science and practice — yet often remain fragmented and disconnected from delivery systems. Using the CGIAR Regional Scaling Hub Network and International Innovation Hub as examples, this session explores how to close gaps and build synergies to strengthen scaling partnerships and cross-regional learning.
What does it take to scale innovations where uncertainty is the norm? Join leading experts from CGIAR, WFP, FCDO, and the private sector as they explore responsible scaling in fragile settings, sharing practical lessons, challenging assumptions, and uncovering pathways to achieve lasting, inclusive impact.
Join an intensive masterclass with leading scaling scientists and university peers from Africa and Asia to sharpen your understanding of scaling, innovation systems and responsible scaling. Then help shape the first Global South scaling curriculum, and take these ideas back to your students and institution.
Proven innovations rarely reach scale without investment and strong delivery systems. Through interactive role play, follow an AfDB investment from government priority to financed delivery, and see how the Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation (TAAT) Clearinghouse connects CGIAR science with development finance through investment pipelines, e-catalogs, value propositions and technical assistance, to deliver impact at scale.
Proposed by you, during the week
The genuinely open slot. It runs alongside the five breakout rooms and is deliberately left empty: you propose the topic during Scaling Week, and we find you a space and a facilitator. Whatever the week surfaces gets its own room.
Tuesday 22 September · 16:30 - 17:30
What does it take for a NARS to transition from a grant-dependent institution to one that generates sustainable commercial returns from its innovations? This session brings together NARS leaders and development partners for a conversation on the realities of research commercialization, drawing on WBG’s Innovation Impact @ Scale diagnostics.
The first half showcases FAO's ATIO Knowledge Base as a platform connecting agrifood innovation ecosystems — interoperability, quality assurance, coordinated knowledge sharing — and makes the case for partnering with ATIO. The second half introduces CGIAR's emerging approach to demand-driven research and scaling, with the Demand Intelligence Platform and a hands-on card-sorting exercise that brings the demand discovery journey to life.
This interactive session introduces responsible scaling through key dimensions, including equity, legitimacy and power, as well as existing tools to support its implementation in practice. Participants identify personally relevant principles, put on their creative hats by drawing what sticks with them most, and apply principles to scaling scenarios through facilitated groupwork.
Drawing on experiences from South Sudan, this session explores how locally led pathways, resilient seed systems, strategic partnerships, and adaptive learning enable scaling in fragile and conflict-affected settings. Featuring perspectives from the Government of South Sudan, the University of Juba, and IRC, participants will discover pathways to lasting impact.
This session uses Liberating Structures methodology to facilitate joint reflection by the participants on questions of justice, responsibility, and inclusion in scaling processes: how to integrate and leverage these in order to achieve greatest possible impact.
Proposed by you, during the week
The genuinely open slot. It runs alongside the five breakout rooms and is deliberately left empty: you propose the topic during Scaling Week, and we find you a space and a facilitator. Whatever the week surfaces gets its own room.
Wednesday 23 September · 14:30 - 15:30
How can proven agricultural innovations become investable within the EU Global Gateway? Using solar irrigation in an East African strategic corridor, participants will step into the roles of European and local businesses, financiers and public actors to build an investment proposition and identify what Global Gateway needs to finance, convene or de-risk.
Promising innovations rarely fail because the technology does not work; they stall when the right partner, capital and visibility do not meet at the right stage.
Too often, scaling efforts follow a push logic while systems are not ready to absorb innovations. Drawing on Enabel's support to nearly 50 social innovators, participants will challenge prevailing assumptions, identify adoption bottlenecks, then explore demand-driven approaches - incentives, financing, partnerships - that pull innovations into systems rather than pushing them.
How do you evaluate whether the scaling effort was worth it? This session presents a new framework for evaluating scaling efforts, developed by CGIAR for its 2027 midline portfolio evaluations. Drawing on a recent Kenya country evaluation, we'll explore how this framework works in practice and invite participants to shape priority questions and tackle methodological challenges, whatever their organization.
What does it take to build co-ownership in scaling partnerships from a multi-stakeholder and Global South perspective? Drawing on 18 months of the Scaling Coalition and Netherlands Food Partnership experience, we put current models and assumptions to the test: What's in it for you, what gets in the way, and how do we move to collective action?
Proposed by you, during the week
The genuinely open slot. It runs alongside the five breakout rooms and is deliberately left empty: you propose the topic during Scaling Week, and we find you a space and a facilitator. Whatever the week surfaces gets its own room.
Wednesday 23 September · 16:00 - 17:00
Why do technically sound innovations so often fail to scale? Rarely because farmers refuse to adopt them directly. Far more often because bottlenecks block scale — seed supply, spare parts, affordable credit — and actors are not clearly identified with the mandate, incentive, money and capacity to keep the pathway running after the project closes. This session distils eight messages from the 19 CGIAR Scaling for Impact flagship solution scaling tracks, spanning many countries, crops and agrifood sectors, on what separates innovations that take root from those that stall. Delivered game-show style: the audience guesses before we reveal.
Current finance falls short of addressing global climate and nature challenges. Carbon markets and payments for ecosystem services can benefit farmers and rural communities while improving climate outcomes. Yet they remain underutilized. This session explores tools to prioritize climate action in agrifood systems, mobilize finance, and overcome barriers to scaling.
Scaling evidence-based interventions in food, land, and water systems requires more than strong evaluation results. IPA's scaling ingredients framework and scalability assessment give researchers and practitioners a shared structure for diagnosing what must be in place before scale-up begins. This session presents both tools and equips participants to apply them.
Young people are not only future beneficiaries of innovation but potential scaling champions. This session explores what is different about scaling with and through youth, asking who gets recognized, who is prepared to scale, and who gets the opportunity to lead. It examines the capabilities, support and access needed to build a more diverse generation of responsible and inclusive scaling leaders.
We treat communications as the last step — awareness, reporting, results. But communication shapes adoption, trust, partnerships and investment decisions, which makes it a scaling pathway, not a wrap-up. Drawing on AICCRA's communications strategy and examples across CGIAR, a short provocation opens a discussion on embedding it from the outset.
Proposed by you, during the week
The genuinely open slot. It runs alongside the five breakout rooms and is deliberately left empty: you propose the topic during Scaling Week, and we find you a space and a facilitator. Whatever the week surfaces gets its own room.
Thursday 24 September · 10:00 - 11:00
Bridging agricultural innovation and smallholder adoption, AGRA and partners including CGA, NPCK, Farm Africa, county governments, and Village-Based Advisors showcase proven last-mile scaling pathways. This panel highlights how grassroots extension, inclusive market systems, and multi-stakeholder partnerships accelerate technology delivery to transform African food systems at scale.
Capacity sharing on scaling is fragmented — let's change that together. In this interactive session you'll test a prototype repository chatbot from the Scaling Coalition, exchange insights with peers, and co-shape its next version. A small act of building something that can serve ecosystems far beyond this room.
Scaling impact is a strategic balancing act, which requires dynamic evaluation to achieve optimal and responsible scale. A World Café format invites participants to learn with us and explore these concepts through two CultiAF+ cases (IDRC) and experience from CIAT, to discuss indicators and approaches for assessing scaling performance more holistically.
Scaling journeys in rice-based systems from Asia and Africa, told honestly — followed by a joint look at what travels between contexts and what doesn't. Further session details are still coming in from the host.
Students and post-graduates
The slot held for the Future Impact Scalers, the students and post-graduates coming through the award. The topic is theirs to set and is still to be confirmed.
Proposed by you, during the week
The genuinely open slot. It runs alongside the five breakout rooms and is deliberately left empty: you propose the topic during Scaling Week, and we find you a space and a facilitator. Whatever the week surfaces gets its own room.
Thursday 24 September · 11:30 - 12:30
This session will explore how CGIAR and international financial institutions (IFIs) can bridge the gap between innovation and investment, connecting proven solutions with country priorities and development-finance pipelines. It will test the proposed Innovation Clearinghouse as a demand-driven mechanism to move innovations from evidence and scaling readiness toward investment, implementation and impact at scale.
This session gathers multi-stakeholder input on what a cross-border agri-tech commercialization pathway should look like, drawing on live experience from the JCP1 pilot, a five-country project of the Innovation Agencies in Africa Network. Innovators, regulators, investors and partners rotate through phase-specific World Café tables to share perspectives, identify barriers and shape the blueprint for scaling across Africa.
How do gender-responsive scaling frameworks hold up in the field? Bringing together researchers, funders and grassroots practitioners working with women smallholder farmers, this session interrogates the gap between designing inclusive scaling strategies and delivering them, surfacing what it takes and what can go wrong when good intentions meet last-mile reality.
This interactive session draws on five years of evidence from AICCRA (Accelerating Impacts of CGIAR Climate Research for Africa) to explore what it really takes to scale climate solutions across diverse African contexts through a live game of snakes & ladders, reimagined around real scaling dynamics: ladders represent proven enablers while snakes represent recurring barriers.
Using PABRA's Bean Corridor model, demand-led seed systems let grain demand from off-takers guide seed production, aligning actors to deliver the right seed classes at the right time.
How can last-mile agents connect climate-smart solutions with farmers more effectively? A practical look at agent networks, incentives, territory, digital tools and inventory — and what better agent performance delivers.
Proposed by you, during the week
The genuinely open slot. It runs alongside the five breakout rooms and is deliberately left empty: you propose the topic during Scaling Week, and we find you a space and a facilitator. Whatever the week surfaces gets its own room.
Three moments where the whole of Scaling Week is in one room. Deliberately not described in full — some of it is meant to be walked into.
Three hundred people arrive carrying something they need, and most leave without ever saying it out loud. This session sets out to change that: everyone leaves with one clear ask, having made it to several people in the room.
Change changes things, sometimes profoundly. A personal or professional setback can be a painful, even devastating blow, knocking us off course. But even changes that appear to be unalloyed good, a funding windfall, a research breakthrough, a pilot that finally begins to scale, can quietly undo some of what they were meant to build.
Day 2 explores what carries people, and their work, through such turns: what breaks, what holds, and what it takes to rise again. Because these moments, what happens and the stories we tell ourselves about what happens, are often where something extraordinary begins.
Come as you are, nothing to prepare, nothing to defend.
Aid budgets are shrinking, grant-led development is giving way to investment, trade and partnership, and middle powers and philanthropic capital now weigh more than they did. Almost nobody gets to discuss that openly with the governments doing the reordering.
So this session asks the question a week about scaling cannot avoid: who will actually pay for scale in the decade ahead. Not nostalgia for what is gone, but a clear-eyed look at what the new map offers.
The week closes its own loop. What was asked on Tuesday, what came back, and which connections turned into something real.
Then the part that matters most: what carries on after everyone goes home.
Not a headline in its own right: this is where The art of the ask, from Day 1, comes back to close.
The things that are not on the schedule because they never stop.
coffee lounge
The social heart of the week. Coffee, the marketplace spilling into the spaces around it, the posters and the demo tables, and the one place to go if you want to propose an emerging session. Come here to find people rather than rooms.
in and around the Living Room
Posters, tables, demonstrations and one confession booth, spread through the Living Room and the spaces around it, up for all three days. The breaks are the market hours.
open all day, drop in
Not on the schedule and never needs booking. A dedicated host holds the space for all three days: movement, breathing, quiet, and a place to sit down when the day is a lot. No shoes.
one per Open Space block
A sixth track kept empty on purpose. Topics come from the room, during the week.
beyond the breakout rooms
Room 720, the one side quest, for a smaller focused group. Dealmaker rooms. Open cafeteria corners and the library for one-to-ones and quiet work. And a handful of invitation-only spaces for ten to twenty-five people — the Courtyard Tree, the Pool, the Gym, the Playground and a hidden courtyard.
throughout
There are moments in this program we would rather you walked into than read about. The experience is designed, and some of it is meant to be a surprise.
Posters, tables, live demonstrations and one confession booth, spread through the Living Room and the spaces around it for all three days. Thirteen contributions, all confirmed.
Ten optional sessions across the three days. Drop in, nothing to book and nothing to prepare. The two morning sessions are the optional morning movement already in the day flow.
15:00 - 15:30
Somatic movement and restorative yoga: stretching, mobility, breath and mindful movement designed to wake you up without rushing. Comfortable clothing helps, and anything can be adapted to whatever you are wearing.
16:00 - 16:30
A flowing qigong movement. Palm turned upwards as if balancing a cup, you guide the arm through a continuous circle while the whole body softens. Learn the sequence and your mission is complete.
17:00 - 17:30
Simple partner and small-group activities that spark real conversations. Presence, curiosity and authentic relating, in a way that is light, human and surprisingly revealing. Nothing to prepare.
08:15 - 08:45
An energizing start, combining somatic movement, mobility, breath and playful whole-body activation, building warmth gradually. Wear something you can move, stretch and sit in, or come as you are and we will adapt.
14:30 - 15:00
Lie back for breath awareness, diaphragmatic breathing and slow rhythmic breathing. No forceful breathing and no long holds, just a simple reset for body and mind.
16:00 - 16:50
A guided group experience with cold, breath and nervous-system regulation, including preparation, the cold itself and time to integrate afterwards. Wear something that gives easy access to hands, forearms and feet. Not recommended for anyone with Raynaud's disease.
17:30 - 18:00
An open space to pause, arrive and integrate. No agenda and no pressure: share what is present, or simply listen.
08:15 - 08:45
Gentle activation with moments of stillness, and a chance to notice what the week has stirred and integrate it through the body before the day starts.
10:00 - 11:00
A practical, interactive session on how we respond to pressure, uncertainty and change, and on strengthening the tools that help us adapt and keep moving.
ILRI Campus11:00 - 11:30
A simple tai chi-inspired movement to loosen the spine, release shoulder tension and restore flow after a day of sitting, talking and thinking. No mat and no change of clothes needed.
Tuesday · 19:30 - 22:00
Optional, off campus at a rooftop in town, and the easiest place to make the ask you spent the morning sharpening.
Wednesday · 18:30 - 21:30 · Main Tent
The big night, on campus, with free time from 17:30 to get ready. Food, drinks, and a format we are not going to spoil here. Come as yourself rather than as your job title.
Thursday · 19:30 - 21:30
Optional and unhurried, for anyone not flying out that night.
