Collaborative funding key to scaling agricultural innovation, food security – Heifer VP

Adesuwa Ifedi, senior vice president of Africa Programmes, Heifer International, has urged global leaders, and innovators in the private sector to strengthen global food security through collaborations, particularly in Africa.

At a panel discussion at the World Food Forum recently, she emphasised the need for increased collaborative efforts between developmental organisations and innovators, as well as funding partners, to unlock opportunities in agriculture.

“We have worked alongside smallholder farmers globally for 80 years, and in Africa for 50 years, and this experience has shown us how to bring and sustain innovation, especially in fragile and poor infrastructure environments,” Ifedi said.

“In the past couple of years, we have begun to operate as innovation brokers — bringing in innovation, supporting it to go into communities, supporting the communities to give feedback, which helps in the rethinking, redesigning and adapting of that innovation and then taking it to scale,” she added.

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According to her, lessons from this approach have shown that the more development organisations and innovators collaborate to leverage resources and individual strengths, and funders become more systemic, food security will be achieved.

She said further, “We cannot innovate in silos. The whole ecosystem has to connect. This means we need more extensive collaborations because the real world is connected systemically.”

In the area of finance, Ifedi said funding has to become collaborative and innovative, noting the need to fund creativity in the agricultural space to address power dynamics.

Giving an example of how increased collaborative funding takes innovations to upscale, she showed how Heifer’s partnership with Hello Tractor, an agritech startup that emerged as a regional winner of Heifer’s influential agribusiness competition — Agriculture, Youth and Technology (AYuTe) Africa NextGen — scaled mechanisation in the continent.

“AYuTe helps us identify innovators working on reaching the last mile and then we use our catalytic financing to test out that innovation,” the vice president said.

She noted that with catalytic financing over a period of three years, Hello Tractor has attracted commercial capital which has helped to scale the innovation.