What’s stopping innovation in agriculture from scaling in lower-income countries? Spoiler: it’s not just a lack of money.
Last week I was invited to be part a panel at Climate Resilience Finance Summit (part of the series of events that make up London Climate Action Week) to discuss this issue, and talk about financial innovation for resilient agriculture more generally.
We took a dive into some increasingly familiar issues: the tricky “too early for investment, too late for grants” trap that many promising ideas face; what resilient agri-innovation really looks like beyond the pilot; and how funders, governments and entrepreneurs can shift from parallel efforts to shared action.
The first thing we did though was to ask the audience to vote on what they felt were the biggest issues. Here’s what they told us:
💰There’s not enough investment to scale beyond pilots;
📊 And those investors are put off by a lack of business models, as well as perceived high risks and low returns;
🤝 There’s not enough collaboration between funders, governments and innovators;
💭 And overall, there’s a lack of innovation capacity for the development of climate-smart initiatives.
The panel kicked off with a conversation about underinvestment, specifically how the funding that does exist often fails to reach the people and places where it could have the most impact.
The blue economy is a prime example here. Achieving Sustainable Development Goal 14 (Life Below Water) requires around $175 billion in investment every year, but between 2015 and 2019, actual investment added up to just $10 billion. That’s a stark gap.
This gap doesn’t just come from a lack of interest. It’s about the ‘missing middle’; that phase between pilot and scale that gets routinely overlooked. There’s early-stage funding for promising ideas, but many of those ideas stall out before they have a chance to grow. As our audience knew all too well, investors often don’t have the data, tools or risk appetite to back them at that critical stage.
That is starting to change though. Organisations like BFA Global, (a fellow panellist), and our own project, Go Muhazi, are working hard to plug this gap by building new models, sharing risk, and aligning capital more strategically. It was heartening to hear the panel talk about investing in the missing middle as ‘a team sport’, something that’s going to take shared infrastructure, shared language and shared effort in order to really work.
One of the bright spots here is the emergence of new platforms designed to bridge the information gap. Tools like Vula.vc and the ‘matchmaking tool for start-ups and investors’ currently being piloted in Kenya as part of our work with the FCDO-funded Frontier Technologies Hub, are helping build confidence in underfunded sectors.
The conversation shifted to power dynamics; specifically who gets to set the agenda, and who is left out. As Tyler Ferdinand put it, “money is power,” and the people with the money are often the ones calling the shots.
We dug into what it might look like to shift that power, and I shared a few ideas on the psychology of next-century grantmaking we’ve been exploring here at Brink and which Lea has written up. There are people inside donors, government and philanthropy who are working to flip the script; we’re lucky to work alongside a few of them.
But one question cut through: Where are the farmers? And those closest to the problems in general.
It didn’t go unnoticed that no farmers were on stage, and that the conference circuits happen very far away from the action and those who know the problems, because they experience them every day. Everyone in the room agreed there should be more representation. People like Suranjana Gupta, who was also on the panel, are doing important work to make sure farmers’ voices are heard but we all agreed more is possible.
This isn’t just about token inclusion. The agrifood system could cut nearly one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions through accessible, affordable actions. It is also one of the most powerful tools to end extreme poverty and boost economies (Source: World Bank).
Connecting farmers to markets and ensuring they have a real seat at the table is one of the clearest, most actionable ways to unlock impact. Without that, all the talk about resilience and innovation risks missing the point.
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For those looking to dig deeper, here are a few resources shared by the room:
📘 Climate Shot Investor Coalition, from the Climate Policy Initiative
