Low adoption and usage of new agricultural technologies remain a challenge in many low-income countries. This is why a significant portion of CGIAR’s research portfolio involves testing inventions that help smallholder farmers overcome barriers to adopting such technologies. However, these studies tend to have limited scope, with researchers working on the crops and countries they know best, using analytical methods that match their skill sets. This limits the ability to produce broader, more generalizable findings, and thus to provide evidence-based recommendations to policymakers looking to introduce an innovation in a new context.
Instead of treating the large and heterogeneous scope of CGIAR’s work as a hindrance to creating generalizable evidence, we can exploit our global scale and broad expertise to create and synthesize high-quality evidence. Researchers can align their methods through coordinated trials, which test the same intervention(s) using the same methodology, across various contexts in a way that is comparable. Meta-analysis then allows us to synthesize these results and understand if an intervention’s benefits apply across many different contexts.