Africa Does Not Need More Agricultural Pilots: Social Franchising Offers One Promising Way To Scale What Works

By Fentahun Mengistu, Country Director, Sasakawa Africa Association, Ethiopia 

Across Africa, promising agricultural innovations are proving their value. Climate-smart and regenerative farming practices are restoring soils. Improved seed varieties are raising yields. Digital advisory services are bringing timely information closer to farmers. Better post-harvest technologies are reducing losses and protecting incomes. Yet too often, these successes remain trapped inside pilot projects. 

As Africa grapples with the interconnected challenges of climate change, population growth, food insecurity, shrinking donor resources, and widespread youth unemployment, the question is no longer simply to discover what works. The more urgent question is: How do we scale what already works?  It is to build delivery systems capable of taking what works to millions of smallholder farmers—reliably, affordably, and without sacrificing quality. Traditional project-based approaches, while valuable for testing innovations and generating evidence, cannot meet this challenge on their own. 

One promising solution deserves far greater attention: social franchising. 

From successful projects to sustainable systems

For decades, agricultural development has heavily followed a familiar pattern. A project introduces a new technology or practice, trains farmers, records productivity improvements, and generates lessons. But when funding ends, the project team withdraws. The innovation may continue in the original communities, but it rarely spreads far enough or fast enough to transform an entire agricultural system. 

This is not necessarily a failure of the innovation. It is often a failure of the delivery model.   

Social franchising offers a practical way to close that gap between successful pilots and large-scale impact. Drawing on commercial franchising principles, it packages proven agricultural services into standardized, replicable systems that trusted local partners deliver under agreed standards. The innovating organization retains ownership and stewardship of the model, providing training, technical support, quality assurance, performance monitoring, and accountability, while public extension offices, cooperatives, and youth- and women-led enterprises deliver services locally. 

The aim is not to commercialize development assistance, but to combine the discipline and replicability of franchising with a social mission: improving farmers’ productivity, resilience, nutrition, and incomes. This approach balances scale with quality, local ownership with institutional discipline, and expansion with accountability. 

For agriculture, the local delivery partners could be cooperatives, agro-dealers, farmer organizations, youth enterprises, women-led businesses, community seed producers, mechanization providers, or public extension actors.  Instead of relying indefinitely on a centralized project team, these local institutions become a permanent network through which farmers can access tested products, services, and knowledge. 

The result is more than wider coverage. It is stronger local ownership, consistent service quality, rural enterprise development, and greater resilience after external funding ends. 

SAA’s work in Ethiopia demonstrates the possibilities

SAA’s work in Ethiopia offers a compelling example of this approach. 

As in its other countries of operation, the Sasakawa Africa Association (SAA) has developed and refined practical models in Ethiopia covering regenerative agriculture, nutrition-sensitive agriculture, market-oriented production, digital extension, post-harvest management, mechanization, and farmer capacity development. These approaches have consistently delivered positive results at the community level. 

The next frontier is not another collection of isolated pilots. It is the system-wide transformation of proven models into structured service packages that local organizations and enterprises can adopt, deliver, and improve. 

Social franchising provides a practical pathway for doing exactly that. Rather than continuously expanding direct implementation, which is both resource-intensive and difficult to sustain, proven agricultural models can be transformed into structured service packages that local organizations and businesses can adopt, deliver, and continuously improve. 

Many of the necessary building blocks already exist and can all be replicated through shared standards, training, certification, technical support, quality assurance, and performance monitoring.  The priority now is to integrate them into a deliberate scaling system.  

Local Enterprises are already showing the way 

Social franchising is not merely a theoretical proposition. Elements of the model are already visible in locally owned agribusinesses across Ethiopia.  

For instance, over the past five years, SAA has helped establish and strengthen 134 farmer service and agribusiness groups and enterprises across Ethiopia, spanning last-mile agro-dealers, crop-threshing service providers, community-based seed multiplication groups, and agro-processing ventures. Together, they comprise 3,392 members, including 604 women (18%). SAA’s support went far beyond equipment and start-up capital, combining technical training with entrepreneurship and business management, equipment maintenance, quality assurance, and market linkages. This helped the enterprises grow into trusted, locally rooted service providers that have generated about ETB 74.94 million in revenue—approximately USD 0.83 million—and directly served nearly 112,000 farmers, including 21,628 women (19%). Their experience shows how locally anchored mechanization, seed, input-supply, and agro-processing enterprises can sustain agricultural services while creating jobs, incomes, and stronger rural economies. 

Their experience points to a fundamental shift in development thinking: local businesses should not be merely treated as beneficiaries of agricultural programmes. They can become the delivery infrastructure through which innovation reaches farmers at scale.  

These businesses now function as trusted rural service hubs.  They connect farmers with quality seed, crop protection products, fertilizers, post-harvest technologies such as PICS bags, mechanization services, and practical advice. Their proximity to farming communities allows farmers to access essential inputs and information when they need them most, while spending less time and money travelling to distant markets. ­­ 

Six groups reaching more than 39,000 farmers is not yet at a national scale.  But it demonstrates the multiplier effect that becomes possible when capable local enterprises are equipped with a proven model and sustained technical support. .­­­­   

A solution aligned with Africa’s wider priorities  

The relevance of social franchising extends far beyond Ethiopia. 

Across Africa, public extension services are overstretched, government budgets are under pressure, and development funding is becoming increasingly constrained. Meanwhile, increasingly frequent climate shocks require faster, more adaptive, and more localized support for farmers. The continent’s large youth population also needs viable economic opportunities, including in rural areas. 

Social franchising can address several of these challenges simultaneously. 

It can create viable businesses and jobs for young people and women, strengthen local agricultural markets,  expand smallholder farmers’ access to quality services, and improve collaboration among research institutions, extension systems, and private enterprises. Most importantly, it allows proven agricultural innovations to spread through local institutions that remain rooted in their communities, rather than through temporary structures that disappear when a project closes. This makes agricultural transformation both more inclusive and more sustainable. 

Social franchising is not a substitute for government extension, public investment or development partnerships. Nor is every intervention suitable for a franchise model. Governments must continue to uphold standards, invest in research and infrastructure, and ensure that underserved farmers are not left behind. However, social franchising can make each of these investments work harder by providing proven solutions with a structured and disciplined pathway to scale.  

The shift Africa now needs

To realize this potential, governments and development partners should begin designing for scale from the start. They should identify models with strong evidence, define the essential standards that make those models effective, certify and support local delivery partners, build transparent monitoring systems, and create financing mechanisms that allow rural enterprises to grow.  

Development organizations must also be willing to change their role. Once an innovation has been proven, success should no longer be measured mainly by the size of the implementing project. It should be measured by how many capable local actors can deliver the model effectively—and how long they can continue to do so without permanent donor dependence. 

Direct implementation will always remain essential for experimentation, evidence generation, and work in complex or underserved settings. But a successful innovation should not remain confined to the place where it was first tested.  

For policymakers, development partners, and the private sector, it offers an opportunity to rethink how agricultural services are delivered, not through ever-expanding project footprints, but through empowered local enterprises capable of sustaining impact long after external support has ended. 

Africa does not suffer from a shortage of promising agricultural ideas. It suffers from too few durable systems for replicating them. 

The continent’s agricultural future will not be determined by how many successful pilots it launches. It will be determined by how effectively it turns proven innovations into trusted, locally owned services that reach farmers at scale. Scaling is no longer a technical exercise but a strategic imperative. Social franchising can help make that shift—from projects to systems, from beneficiaries to local service providers, and from promising pilots to lasting agricultural transformation.