CGIAR Centers under Scaling for Impact program have engaged Zambian stakeholders on its Demand Intelligence Portal, a technology-driven tool intended to help identify what is needed to successfully scale agricultural innovations and investments in the country.
The Demand Intelligence for country planning workshop held in Lusaka, Zambia on 29 & 30 September 2026, attracted stakeholders from key sectors including national research institutions, universities, farmer organisations, development partners, private sector players, financial institutions and CGIAR centres to provide feedback on how the platform can better respond to Zambia’s agricultural needs.
Speaking at the workshop attended by the Zambian Business Times-ZBT, the Coordinator for Country Strategy under the CGIAR Scaling for Impact program, Matieyedou Abdou Konlambigue said the platform was still being improved and was not being presented as a finished product.
Konlambigue explained that the purpose of bringing stakeholders together was to obtain candid views on whether the information generated by the platform reflected Zambia’s realities, what was missing and how different users could benefit from it.
“From the feedback we received, I was really impressed by the candid conversations from the different stakeholders, overall they find it useful, but they have given us feedback and we have to work to improve it, because it is not going to be the end, we need to continue improving it as people use it,” he said.
Konlambigue stated that the feedback was particularly important because the portal was initially developed from a research perspective, while potential users such as private companies, development organisations and other institutions may require different information and interfaces.
He said CGIAR would therefore spend the coming weeks adapting the platform and developing interfaces that could make it easier for different categories of users to access and apply the information generated by the system.
“Instead of going random, the tool will help you fine-tune and target interventions very well, identifying the solutions and packages of innovations that have the ingredients to scale and also showing what other interventions need to be put together to support that process,” said Konlambigue.
He further indicated that this could be particularly important for Zambia’s agricultural ambitions because achieving large production targets would require the country to identify which innovations, technologies and interventions have the strongest potential to be taken to scale.
Meanwhile, speaking at the same event, Regional Director for the Southern Africa Hub at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), Dr. David Chikoye said CGIAR wanted its research, innovation and scaling activities to respond more directly to the priorities of countries such as Zambia.
Dr. Chikoye added that the Demand Intelligence approach was intended to strengthen coordination among CGIAR centres, scientific programmes and scaling partners while providing better evidence on Zambia’s priorities, needs and opportunities.
He stressed that the Lusaka meeting was not simply meant to convince stakeholders to accept CGIAR’s assessment, but to allow them to challenge the information presented and identify gaps that needed to be addressed before the approach was widely used.
“The evidence will only be useful if it reflects how institutions actually make decisions and the information they need, so we want stakeholders to tell us whether it reflects Zambia’s priorities, what important needs or opportunities are missing and how this evidence should be made available,” said Dr. Chikoye.
Speaking in an interview with Zambian Business Times-ZBT during the workshop, Scaling and Artificial Intelligence Consultant, Murat Sartas indicated that the portal could eventually help government and other actors understand why some agricultural interventions fail to reach scale by looking beyond the availability of an innovation itself.
Sartas explained that the platform examines issues such as funding, influence and the suitability of an innovation, helping users identify whether there is sufficient investment, the right champions and supporting conditions needed to take an intervention from an idea to widespread use.
“The purpose is to help achieve impact, because if we want to reach something as ambitious as 10 million tons of maize, we need to understand the whole demand structure, including national and international funding, private sector investment, banks, insurance, service providers and the market,” he said.
Sartas told ZBT that the system could also help users identify specific gaps and possible solutions within a short period, rather than spending months conducting separate studies before discovering that an intervention lacks funding, infrastructure, skills, suppliers or other requirements.
He added that the platform was initially designed mainly for governments, researchers, investors and scaling organisations, but could be adapted in future to directly serve farmers by providing information on issues such as market demand, input availability, service providers and production risks.
“If farmers are interested, we can adapt it to crops so that they can get an idea of whether there are enough buyers, service providers and other conditions for what they want to produce, but that would require additional design and information that is relevant to farmers,” said Sartas.
Meanwhile, in another interview, IITA Agricultural Economist, Julius Manda said the portal was now being exposed to a wider group of stakeholders after undergoing testing so that additional information and perspectives could be incorporated before wider use.
Manda noted that the system could help identify where agricultural innovations have effective demand and where gaps remain in funding, implementation and other conditions necessary for an innovation to become scalable.
“The Demand Intelligence Portal gives us an opportunity to see where the gaps are in making an innovation scalable, where there is effective demand, where we need to improve and where we need to maintain what is already working,” he said.
According to Manda, the platform is intended to support evidence-based decisions rather than speculation by bringing together credible information to show which agricultural solutions have demonstrated potential and where resources may need to be directed.
Speaking to ZBT during the workshop, IITA Molecular Biology Technical Officer, Joseph Botha, who had an opportunity to review the tool, said the Demand Intelligence Portal was useful in generating intelligence on the effective demand for scaling agricultural innovations and solutions.
“I found the Demand Intelligence Portal to be quite a useful tool as it generates intelligence on the effective demand for scaling innovations and solutions based on the availability of funding, context specificity and opinion leaders or drivers, while also being user-friendly, easy to navigate and supported by good visualisation features,” said Botha.
He explained that the Research Opportunity section is particularly useful because it identifies research gaps that could guide future research efforts, but said the section could be expanded to include agripreneurs, farmers and other actors across the agricultural value chain so that the portal becomes not only a research planning tool but also a value-chain decision-making tool.
The stakeholders’ feedback is therefore expected to play a central role in shaping the next stage of the Demand Intelligence Portal, with CGIAR indicating that it will continue adapting the system in the coming weeks before making it more widely accessible.
However, for ordinary Zambians, the significance of the platform lies in its potential to help decision-makers answer a basic question before committing large amounts of money to an agricultural intervention.
By Philip Sinkala
