Scaling Week 2024: The Unconference Experience

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    CGIAR
  • Published on
    11.03.25

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Warming up together on the first day of Scaling Week 2024 in Nairobi in a big opening circle (Photo credit: CGIAR).

An uber-friendly “unconference” was designed as much for human experience as for scientific and practical understanding of scaling innovations. 

In early December 2024, some 200 people gathered in a very large white tent erected on a front lawn on the leafy campus of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) in Kabete, a suburb of Kenya’s ever-growing Nairobi capital, to discuss “scaling agricultural innovations.”

The organizers of the event worked with “experience designers” – professionals who create memorable, engaging journeys by ensuring every element of an event contributes meaningfully to its goals. Their aim was to maximize engagement and create meaningful interactions for all participants. They wanted the week to be informal and incorporate unconference elements – a participant-driven format where the agenda emerges organically – offering multiple ways for people to connect, interact, learn from, and inspire each other. The event featured a mix of curated plenary and co-created parallel sessions. The organizing committee ensured thematic coherence and smooth logistical execution based on strong community input and feedback. The invited participants represented CGIAR Centres, national agricultural research and extension systems from developing countries, government agencies and other public-sector bodies, non-governmental organizations, and private companies. 

Colleagues from the International Water Management Institute, from left to right: Muluken Elias Adamseged, Abdulkarim Seid, and Amare Tekle using their mobile devices to share their votes in a plenary session (photo credit: CGIAR). 

Rather than provide a one-size-fits-all program for such diverse participants, this three-day gathering was co-created by its invited participants in the weeks preceding the physical event, with the agenda built online to adapt to the participants needs and wishes, rather than the other way round. Plenary sessions were kept to a minimum but without sacrificing a communal experience. Attendees were invited to ‘vote with their feet’ and bounce between parallel sessions, embracing the ‘JOMO’ (joy of missing out). Session organizers were encouraged to check their egos at the door and not to feel discouraged if people left their session early. 

Whoever comes are the right people, whenever it starts is the right time, whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened, and when it’s over, it’s over. 

—The Art of Hosting  

Flipping the script on some conventional conferences, with numbing plenary speeches by politically correct elites and panel discussions by famous subject experts, this was more akin to a gathering of festival goers cross-pollinating their diverse enthusiasms. The general vibe was analogue rather than digital – less lofty rhetoric about paradigm shifts and more scrappy searches for inflection points, less academic speak and more talk of real-world challenges and applications. 

Participants get to know each other in an ice breaker session under the warm sun of Nairobi. From left to right: Abenda Ofosu (International Water Management Institute), Seraphine Uzamushaka (International Potato Center), Rica Joy Flor (International Rice Research Institute), Murshed-e-Jahan Khondker (WorldFish), Deepa Joshi (International Water Management Institute) (photo credit: CGIAR).  

Scaling Week 2024 included several side events on the ILRI campus. These included the following.  

  • A hybrid launch of a special issue of the science journal Agricultural Systems by the CGIAR Independent Science for Development Council on ‘Enabling Inclusive Innovation on Agriculture and Food Systems’, with four of the authors presenting research related to CGIAR (4 December 2024). 

Nompumelelo Obokoh, ISDC Vice Chair & CEO, South African Council for Natural Scientific Professions (SACNASP) in a presentation at 2024 Science Forum, organized by the Independent Science for Development Council at Scaling Week 2024 (photo credit: ISDC Secretariat). 

  • A press briefing to introduce CGIAR’s ambitious new Scaling for Impact Program (4 December 2024).

CGIAR’s Independent Advisory and Evaluation Service team members arriving with excitement at Scaling Week 2024; from left: Ibtissem Jouini, Domagoj Vrbos, and Ines Gonzalez de Suso (photo credit: CGIAR). 

 The warm aesthetics of Scaling Week 2024 included friendly hosts welcoming participants up a green-carpet to the big tent; morning communal exercises to kick-off each day; soulful instrumental music played between sessions; daily social events (coffee breaks, communal lunches, evening receptions); a fun ‘failure festival’ organized one evening to help deconstruct society‘s perception of failure and instead celebrate and learn from failures; a lounge tent set up for conversations over coffee and tea, another for meet-ups and more intimate one-on-one talks, and a third quiet room for people wanting momentary refuge from all the socializing; and a WhatsApp community group  provided guides to sessions and a place for further participant messaging and connecting. Every amenity was designed to create an environment to bring people together. 

Iddo Dror (International Livestock Research Institute and CGIAR’s Portfolio Performance Unit) viewing the ‘Sugar Cube’ walls at Scaling Week 2024 (photo credit: CGIAR). 

The discernible focus on sheer friendliness was exemplified in the ‘Sugar Cubes’. Fun photos of every participant taken at the registration table by professional photographers were pasted into envelopes on a wall of ‘sugar cubes’. Everyone was invited to write notes of gratitude or appreciation for others and to pop them into the relevant envelopes, which the participants took home with them at the end of the week. Getting such acknowledgements was indeed ‘sweet’, but many found it even sweeter to have this rare opportunity to take the time to acknowledge others. 

Md Masud Rana (left) and Maherin Ahmed, both working at CIMMYT in Bangladesh, dressed up to promote an interactive pirate-themed session about the Scaling for Impact program (photo credit: CGIAR). 

There was also a notable campy side to the Scaling Week, in keeping with the aim of encouraging ‘serious play’. One of the initiatives organizing sessions at the event was CGIAR’s brand new, and highly ambitious, Scaling for Impact Program, which starts in 2025. Members of the team that in 2024 led and organized writing the proposal for this new program decked themselves out in pirate gear on the first day of the event. (The pirate meme had come up in an initial meeting of the writing team months earlier.) Wanting their scaling science to be experienced as fresh, fun and engaging as well as important, they were unapologetically over-the-top, their pirate antics energizing their audiences. 

A session on the last afternoon was conducted as a ‘fishbowl’, with three World Bank staff sitting in the centre of the tent and the rest of the participants seated around them in a circle. Individuals entered and left the fishbowl to join or exit the conversation as desired. 

Joy Njeri, working with our experience design consultancy Impact Hub Nairobi, and Mijide Keeke, multidisciplinary designer at Keeke Art, helped make Scaling Week as memorable as possible – during and after the event. Here, they are captured on the last evening of the event (photo credit: CGIAR). 

Scaling Week ended as it began, with this ‘scaling tribe’ gathering on the grassy lawn for early evening drinks and snacks over much laughter, dancing, and other antics… a fitting close to an event that was always about more than just a conference; it was a celebration of community, collaboration, and the shared journey of scaling agrifood innovations. Designed as an event from people, for people, it emphasized connection, learning, and fun in equal measure. By fostering a festival-like atmosphere with its warm, inclusive spaces and creative activities, the week reinforced the idea that scaling is as much about human relationships as it is about scientific and technical solutions. This unconference proved that when diverse minds come together in an environment that values openness and co-creation, the possibilities for innovation and impact are limitless. Scaling Week was an experiment in how we engage with scaling differently. It wasn’t perfect – nor was it meant to be. The beauty of this kind of gathering is that it evolves with its participants, and we take these learnings forward as we shape what’s next. 

The momentum doesn’t stop here. As we take these insights forward, we look ahead to Scaling Week 2025—another opportunity to reconnect, rethink, and reimagine how we scale innovations for lasting impact in agrifood systems. See you at the next Scaling Week! 

Acrobatics and other dynamic elements were woven into the un-conference experience, creating powerful parallels between real-life challenges and professional scaling objectives (photo credit: CGIAR). 

This gathering of researchers and funders, developers, and community workers was the third annual Scaling Week put on by ILRI, IWMI, the CGIAR Ukama Ustawi Regional Initiative on Diversification in East and Southern Africa and the CGIAR Portfolio Performance Unit. Scaling Week was organized by a team led by Iddo Dror, of ILRI’s Impact at Scale Program and a scaling workstream of Ukama Ustawi, and Inga Jacobs-Mata, of Ukama Ustawi. 

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