Sustainable agriculture has huge potential to address the many challenges faced by our food system today, bringing the promise of lower greenhouse gas emissions, enhanced biodiversity and soil health, and improved farmer livelihoods and human health. Yet, despite the many sustainable agriculture commitments made in Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs)[1] at the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit,[2] shifts towards sustainable agriculture have yet to occur in most national food systems.[3]

Transforming our current food systems to sustainable agriculture is highly complex. It requires fundamental shifts in how we grow food,[4] including exploring innovative approaches to plant nutrition beyond conventional fertilizers and addressing practices such as monocropping, which, depending on scale and context, can degrade soil and reduce biodiversity. These shifts have a significant cost: Dalberg estimated that shifting 100% of agriculture to regenerative practices globally would cost up to $430B annually over the next 10 years. Nevertheless, the externalized costs of our current industrial food system—in terms of health hidden costs from productivity losses, environmental hidden costs from greenhouse gas emissions, etc.—vastly outweigh those costs at $12-19.8 trillion annually.[5]

One element makes this transition especially challenging:  It’s important to work toward alignment between the many stakeholders within each food systems about how to transition food systems in practice. Stakeholders have differing objectives: farmers prioritize their livelihoods, financiers and retailers prioritize returns, and consumers prioritize food quality and affordability. Furthermore, the transition to sustainable agriculture is deeply local, requiring solutions that are highly tailored to different operating contexts and landscapes. It will look different in central Kenya, a temperate area where maize, beans, and tea and coffee are commonly grown, compared to the tropical savannas of Brazil’s Cerrado, where soybean, cotton, and sugarcane thrive.

The question is: How can we accelerate the transition to sustainable food systems by designing locally driven, common roadmaps for transformation?

Why Build Roadmaps for the Sustainable Agriculture Transformation?

At Dalberg, we collaborate closely with local stakeholders and funders to support the creation of roadmaps for the sustainable agriculture transition. There are significant benefits associated with creating these roadmaps, as they:

• Provide direction: Roadmaps for sustainable agriculture can set a common vision for what we need to achieve, and articulate actionable solutions and pathways for the transition.
• Facilitate coordination: Roadmaps help coordinate between different stakeholders in the ecosystem, ensuring that efforts are complementary and each party is working towards the same goal.
• Localize the general: Roadmaps emphasize the need for national or sub-national food systems, providing context-specific pathways for implementing solutions and seeding benefits back into local geographies.
• Prioritize local communities: Roadmaps emphasize community-owned strategies, allowing local stakeholders to direct funder flows by articulating their needs, while generating community buy-in for long-term solution implementation.
• Accelerate impact: Roadmaps articulate key funding priorities, which help guide funders in pooling their resources towards supporting high-impact solutions and generating greater funding momentum.

Case Study: Impactful Sustainable Agriculture Transition Roadmaps in Brazil

Dalberg developed a first-of-its-kind roadmap for the sustainable agriculture transformation in Brazil, where we engaged with philanthropic funders and over 40 local organizations to identify key challenges, opportunities, and priorities for the transformation, focusing on smallholder and commercial farmers. More than 30 solutions were surfaced in this process, which we categorized into three priority levels based on their potential to drive impact and momentum and the additionality of philanthropic funding. This roadmap was used to foster greater collaboration amongst local implementers and funders around the prioritized solutions and has been used as an entry point for new funders interested in supporting food systems transformation in Brazil. An ongoing coordination mechanism has also been established between involved funders, allowing them to pool resources and channel funds to the highest-impact solutions.

Said one of the funders involved in the process: “The great thing about this roadmap is that we built something so robust and legitimate, that now that we something really powerful to base food systems transform on; it can be the bedrock of multiple future initiatives and that’s a really important legacy.”

Fig 1A: Exhibits from our sustainable agriculture transformation roadmap in Brazil: Executive summary

Fig 1B: Exhibits from our sustainable agriculture transformation roadmap in Brazil: Prioritization of solutions

Case Study: Impactful Sustainable Agriculture Transition Roadmaps in East Africa

As part of the Regenerative and Agroecological Food Systems Transitions (RAFT) initiative[6], Dalberg is also working closely with funders and local organizations to accelerate sustainable agriculture in Kenya and Tanzania.

Leveraging each country’s national agroecology strategy, and with guidance from national stakeholders around solution design and costing, we co-designed landscape-level transition roadmaps across two lighthouse landscapes in both countries: Murang’a county in Kenya, where crops such as maize, sorghum, coffee and tea are commonly grown across 230,000 farming households, and the Lake Zone cluster in Tanzania, where smallholders farm across 3.7M hectares of land, and maize, kidney beans, rice, and cotton are popular crops. Alongside consultation with local stakeholders, these roadmaps have helped align donors with local needs and could catalyze over $40M in funding towards these key solutions to transition up to 25% of farmers in the identified landscapes. Using these roadmaps as a foundation, the RAFT team is continuing its fundraising work, ensuring that prioritized solutions get off the ground as soon as possible.

Fig 2A: Exhibits from our work with RAFT in Kenya and Tanzania: Prioritized solutions

Fig 2B: Exhibits from our work with RAFT in Kenya and Tanzania: Estimation of funding needs

Lessons for Successful Roadmapping and Implementation

Our experience designing these roadmaps—and several others—have helped us to distil the following principles which have been essential in guiding our roadmap creation process for sustainable agriculture transitions.

Identify Solutions that are Specific, Complementary, and Impactful

The solutions identified in the roadmap should be critical leverage points for the sustainable agriculture transition and highly complementary, preventing duplicate work. By prioritizing the key solutions, greater momentum can be generated towards the sustainable agriculture transition once these solutions are successfully rolled out.

For example, in Kenya, we prioritized activities focused on local market building and encouraging local consumption, while in Brazil, we focused on 2-3 solutions addressing each core component of local food systems: smallholder farmers, large-scale commercial farming, and market linkages and local consumption.

Foster Local Ownership of Process and Content

It is key to ensure local stakeholders, representative of a wide set of local organizations, own the process of identifying key priorities and have a final say on local needs. This ensures the roadmap directly addresses what’s needed to accelerate the sustainable agriculture transition in the specific landscape.

There is a need to support and capacity build local coordination bodies, ensuring the journey to sustainable agriculture can be self-managed and sustained. For example, the National Organic and Ecological Agriculture Strategy Implementation Task Force, appointed by the government to oversee the implementation of the agroecology strategy in Tanzania, was a key stakeholder engaged during the consultation process for the Tanzania lighthouse identification.

Coordinate Funding Efforts, Alongside Learning and Knowledge Sharing

High-level coordination between funders is needed to streamline funding to grantees, helping lower the operational burden for them while encouraging pooled funding towards the highest-impact solutions. This also fosters a culture of learning and knowledge sharing amongst funders, and between funders and solution implementers, allowing solutions to evolve according to new insights and respond to changing conditions.

In our Brazil work, local funders we work with emphasized the need for close collaboration between new international funders and local philanthropies, ensuring alignment with existing funding efforts and programs for a more coordinated effort.

Remain Flexible: Treat Roadmapping as a Process, Not a Product

The process of creating and implementing roadmaps require extensive consultation and coordination between many stakeholders, ranging from governments, to funders, to local implementers. This creates buy-in across all stakeholders towards a systems-wide food transformation, allowing solutions to be sustained and scaled in the long term.

Across Kenya and Tanzania, we had engaged at least 20 country-specific and regional stakeholders over more than 30 interviews and workshops and continually involved them in the roadmap implementation process. Many solutions may require multiple rounds of testing to figure out what works, while continually adapting to changing external conditions. This allows for a more coordinated effort towards systemic change, ultimately accelerating impact at a faster rate.

Roadmaps have proven to be an effective tool for coordination, empowering local stakeholders, and getting the most effective solutions off the ground. Get in touch with us to explore the process of creating effective, context-specific roadmaps to accelerate the sustainable agriculture transition.

[1] https://wwfint.awsassets.panda.org/downloads/unlocking_and_scaling_climate_solutions_in_food_systems___wwf_analysis_of_ndcs_2022.pdf

[2] https://www.unfoodsystemshub.org/docs/unfoodsystemslibraries/stocktaking-moment/un-secretary-general/sgreport_en_rgb_updated_compressed.pdf?sfvrsn=560b6fa6_33

[3] https://www.fao.org/sustainable-development-goals-data-portal/data/indicators/indicator-241-proxy-progress-towards-productive-and-sustainable-agriculture/en

[4] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12571-021-01221-4

[5] https://futureoffood.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/annex-cultivating-change2.pdf

[6] https://story.futureoffood.org/cultivating-change/index.html