Resources

• Gates Agricultural Innovations, also known as Gates Ag One, was created to accelerate the most promising agricultural breakthroughs and innovations in reaching – and benefiting – smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
• As a nonprofit affiliate of the Gates Foundation, we act like an agricultural innovation accelerator, connecting what is currently a fragmented R&D pipeline for smallholders. 
• We champion a coordinated, networked approach to innovation that generates and shares knowledge freely, believing that collaboration creates the best results. 
• Our operating model is therefore underpinned by dynamic partnerships, both with organizations local to our headquarters in St. Louis, MO, such as the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, as well as leading institutions around the world.

• Gates Ag One is demand driven, focused on investing in areas with the greatest potential for impact that provide smallholder farmers with the options that best meet their needs.
• We are most interested in innovations that lead to improved varieties of six priority crops:
  • Cassava, one of the most important crops to smallholder farmers and African diets.
  • Cowpea, an all-purpose crop that holds impressive capacity to nourish people, livestock, and the soil.
  • Maize, the most abundantly produced cereal crop in the world, used for food, feed and fuel.
  • Rice, the bedrock of food security for millions.
  • Soybean, a crucial commodity crop for economic development and a global source of protein and plant-based oil.
  • Sorghum, an important crop for smallholder farmer adaptation to climate change, particularly in the world’s arid regions.
• Our initial portfolio of research grants is focused on taking advantage of plant biology to increase the productivity and resilience of crops that are central to smallholder agricultural systems. These first projects include:
  • Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency (RIPE), which targets improvements in photosynthesis, given just 1% of sunlight is currently converted to support plant growth.
  • Enabling Nutrient Symbioses in Agriculture (ENSA), a Cambridge University-led project focused on maximizing naturally occurring processes to enhance nutrient uptake.
  • Cassava Source-Sink (CASS), which unites researchers from 11 institutions around the world to optimize cassava physiology.
• We also work with partners to protect intellectual property to ensure that promising early-stage innovations can ultimately be translated into products beneficial to smallholder farmers in line with Global Access principles.

We believe that delivering agricultural innovations for smallholder farmers, as well as building local capacity for the long term, requires the skills and talents of many. As such, we consult with a broad range of stakeholders – from National Agricultural Research and Extension systems, farmers’ cooperatives, small and medium enterprises, and more — to deliver the greatest impact for those who need it most. 

We are also developing an open innovation approach that aims to build bridges across sectors and markets, accelerating product development for smallholder farmers. This approach aims to bring together the crop research and development sector — collaboratively evaluating, de-risking, and advancing the best science to improve smallholder farmer livelihoods and the communities they feed.

We believe that a viable enabling environment is as important as new innovations themselves and that collaboration, not competition, creates the best results.