Thai Thi Minh is a Principle Researcher at the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), leading innovation scaling research. She has led multi-country scaling partnerships on solar-powered irrigation. Her work bridges research, private sector engagement and policy, which gives her a grounded view of what enables scale in practice.
Why Africa’s irrigation potential isn’t scaling – and what donors are missing
Across Sub-Saharan Africa, decades of research and investment point to the same conclusion: that small-scale irrigation could be a powerful lever for food security, climate resilience and rural livelihoods in regions where over half the population is employed in agriculture. Millions of hectares are suitable, technologies are available and governments are on board, but expansion has been slow and uneven with gaps in financing, infrastructure, markets and institutional capacity. Scaling – taking a successful small-scale initiative and expanding, adapting and sustaining it to reach more people – has not kept pace. The problem is not ambition nor a lack of solutions, but the way scaling itself has been approached.
Across the development sector, innovations and policy ideas with real promise often fail to deliver impact beyond the pilot phase because they are scaled as blueprints, rather than being treated as living systems. Scaling is approached as a final step, something that happens after a solution has been designed, instead of as a process of adaptation which ensures that users, institutions, markets and governance structures are ready to evolve together.
Our food and water systems are facing pressures unlike anything we have seen before. The impacts of climate change, rising demand, political instability and tighter budgets are pushing countries of the Global South into cycles of growing risks. The development sector is also going through its own reckoning, with 360 billion US dollars in official development assistance (ODA) funding lost in 2024 and 2025. The sector is now seeing an increase in accelerators to bring in capital and scale private-sector products. But without structural change to the ecosystem, finance, policies, markets, incentives and institutions, even the most promising innovations cannot scale.
The challenge is not a lack of innovation but a lack of adaptation. When scaling is seen as a linear process, it assumes that what worked once will work everywhere. But real-world systems, especially in Africa and Asia, are complex, and are constantly changing under the pressures of climate, markets and politics. And in food systems of the Global South, farmers’ decisions to adopt a new tool depend as much on credit and trust as on the technology itself.
For years, accelerators have focused on financing innovation scaling as isolated solutions. This approach leads to short-term wins, but rarely creates long-term transformation. It also leaves behind entrepreneurs who could thrive if the ecosystem and enabling environment around them were managed to evolve with their needs. What we need now are accelerators of systems, or mechanisms that connect innovators, investors and institutions in ways that allow good ideas to survive uncertainty and reshape systems.
The Adaptive Scaling Ecosystem (ASEco), developed by the International Water Management Institute and with partners in Ghana, Mali and Ethiopia, is a framework that helps experts rethink how ecosystems could function for innovations to scale and systems to transform.
In practice, this means co-designing scaling pathways and business models with farmers, the private sector and governments to adjust interventions as contexts change. It also means building governance structures that distribute power and knowledge more fairly. The framework treats scaling as a coevolution process where both the innovation and the system around it learn and change together.
ASEco helps rebuild the “plumbing” of innovation by aligning the interests of decision-makers, entrepreneurs, farmers and institutions around a shared way forward. In Ethiopia, Ghana and Mali, ASEco was put to the test on one of the most promising yet complex technologies in the Global South – solar-powered, farmer-led irrigation.
The potential is enormous. In sub-Saharan Africa alone, more than nine million hectares of land could be transformed by smallholder irrigation, turning dry seasons into growing seasons and farmers into entrepreneurs, while also reducing energy costs and pollution. But scaling a revolution is never simple, and solar-powered irrigation raises hard questions. How can we make the technology more accessible? How do we prevent exhausting aquifers? And how can we align policies and avoid deepening social inequalities?
In Ghana, where 2.3 million hectares are suitable for solar irrigation, ASEco helped to build 17 new distribution networks, connect more than 2,600 value-chain actors and identify close to 900 new customers, contributing to an 80 per cent jump in sales in just one year. A market segmentation study showed that “one-size-fits-all” products were holding the company back; redesigning for different farmer segments opened the door to entirely new markets.
In Ethiopia, a series of demand–supply workshops supported the expansion of solar irrigation into four new regions and reached nearly 300 farmers with solar pumps. In Mali, scaling partnerships reached more than 6,200 farmers, one quarter of them women, with users reporting income gains of up to USD 5,262 US dollars per hectare. These results were not the outcome of a single technology, but of an ecosystem deliberately aligned around innovation, finance, institutions and real farmer needs.
For decades, success in development and scaling of solar powered, farmer-led irrigation has been measured by hectares covered, pumps installed or farmers reached. But the true impact lies in the stability, fairness and sustainability of the systems that remain when projects end.
With recent funding cuts, many international organisations have had to focus on short-term emergency response rather than resilience-building efforts. Research for Development organisations have a responsibility and an opportunity, to change this mindset. We can influence how donors and governments define impact by reframing our own work, by asking research questions that prioritise resilience, equity and long-term value, by designing programmes that adapt to uncertainty, and by demonstrating that a dollar spent on prevention and system-strengthening goes far further than a dollar spent on an accelerator grant.
ASEco provides the practical pathway for this shift. It offers the evidence base and methodology to show that adaptive solutions not only survive complexity, but generate far greater returns for farmers, institutions and ecosystems over time.
The lessons from Ghana, Ethiopia and Mali point to the same truth: innovations do not scale in a vacuum, they scale in ecosystems. For policy-makers, that means designing programmes which leave room for feedback and flexibility. For donors, it means rewarding learning as much as success and allowing for solutions to shift overtime. For researchers, it means embedding co-design, iteration and scaling into every stage of innovation. If we want lasting impact in a world shaped by climate change and uncertainty, we must stop chasing quick wins and start building resilience from the ground up, with solutions, institutions and communities growing stronger together.
More information:
The Adaptive Scaling Ecosystem (ASEco)
Further reading:
Rural 21 no 04/2022: Financing sustainable agri-food systems
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