This policy brief is built on a portfolio analysis [1] of 15 EU-funded research and innovation (R&I) projects conducted between 2014 and 2024, aimed at fostering sustainable agri-food systems beyond the EU, through international partnerships, particularly with low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).
The projects contributed to strengthening local R&I ecosystems, promoting inclusive stakeholder engagement, and delivering innovative solutions to complex challenges such as climate change and food insecurity. However, the analysis identifies persistent gaps,
including limited LMIC inclusion, short project durations, misalignment with national policies, and inadequate mechanisms for long-term impact evaluation.
The brief recommends transitioning to multi-phase funding models, enhancing co-design and equitable programming, and investing in digital infrastructure and capacity-development. It advocates for stronger public-private partnerships, improved policy integration, and the creation of innovative funding mechanisms to support LMICs and increase their participation. Ultimately, the brief calls for a more inclusive, long-term, and impact-oriented approach to EU-funded agricultural R&I to drive global food system transformation.
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Technologies, practices, organisations or services in a given territory or sector, other actors must take over to organise and facilitate all the changes and capacity building
that will enable the innovation to be deployed.
This is where tailored financing strategies become critical to ensure that multidimensional and multilevel interventions, activities or services can be pursued to support innovation scaling, moving the innovation from one stage to another. The absence of an adequate financing strategy with an explicit scaling strategy traps innovations in a stagnation chasm before they achieve diffusion and scaling.
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Willem Heemskerk and Bertus Wennink (Eds.) (2005) STAKEHOLDER-DRIVEN FUNDING MECHANISMS FOR AGRICULTURAL INNOVATION Case studies from Sub-Saharan Africa
Bulletin 37. 128 pp.
This review examined various experiences describing the performance of stakeholder-controlled funding mechanisms, such as competitive grant schemes (CGSs) and public-private sector matching funds. In countries such as Tanzania and Benin innovative approaches for sustainable stakeholder-driven funding mechanisms have been developed over the last decade.
These experiences were documented in this bulletin, describing best practices and identifying lessons learned. In partnership with KIT (Royal Tropical Institute), specific case studies from Tanzania and Benin were developed by the stakeholders involved and were discussed at local workshops. The overview and the specific cases were further analyzed via a SWOT analysis, and a synthesis was produced of the main findings.
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