Society faces enormous challenges in the transition to sustainable rural development. We are unlikely to make this transition unless we move away from the 20th-century paradigm that sees the world as a logical, linear system focused on “scaling up” the use of technologies to reach hundreds of millions of smallholders.
In a new article published this week on NextBillion, Lennart Woltering of CIMMYT contends that “farming communities are unlikely to continue using a new practice or technology if the surrounding system remains unchanged, since it is this very system that shaped their conventional way of farming.”
Woltering calls on the research for development community to work towards producing deeper system change and offers some key considerations for moving in the right direction.
Read the full article:
‘Pilots Never Fail, Pilots Never Scale’: Why the Global Development Community Needs a More Realistic Approach to Reaching Billions
Download the infographic:
Sustainable systems change at scale: Not “scaling up” but getting “down to earth”
Innovations 
