Senior expert on Innovation and Scaling in the CGIAR Research Program on Roots, Tubers and Bananas, Flagship 5 ‘Improved Livelihoods at Scale’, Cluster 5.4 ‘Scaling RTB Agri-food System Innovations.

The senior expert will assist the CGIAR Research Program on Roots, Tubers and Bananas (RTB) in the further development of effective theories, policies and tools for the responsible scaling of socio-technical innovations. RTB is making considerable progress in this area, and has the potential of becoming a world leading scientific and practice-oriented hub. The Senior Expert will contribute to this development through methodology development and synthesis work, active support of RTB projects, and by playing an ambassador role that contributes to further alignment of scaling approaches across the CGIAR.

The Senior Expert will also support the integration of the scaling work with work done on gender and seed systems. This involves an initiative to develop a large action research and capacity building programme that uses principles of ICT-enabled citizen science to clarify gendered preferences for crop varieties. This information is used as an entry point for the collaborative analyses of formal and informal seed systems, and their (in)capacity to provide desired varieties. Subsequently, insights on system innovation and scaling are applied to test strategies for gender-inclusive seed system transformation. The envisaged programme will work across various crops and countries to enable comparative analysis and synthesis.

Finally, the Senior Expert will contribute to the development of more conducive models of collaboration between the CGIAR, (inter)national universities and other parties in national innovation systems. This serves to strengthen both capacity development in national innovation systems (as a condition for generating impact) and global synthesis work by the CGIAR.