Agriculture landscape across the Global South is studded with millions of smallholder farmers. Although the context of each geography varies significantly, the nature of the challenges faced by the smallholder farmers is similar. Concerted collaboration between Global South agriculture ecosystem stakeholders has great potential to catalyse innovations in technologies and business models and share relevant knowledge that can address these challenges. However, the agriculture ecosystems across different geographies in Global South are not equally conducive to enable this.

Several innovations across are being developed to address the needs of smallholder farmers. They have the potential of solving the common challenges faced by farmers across the Global South. While this shows a great potential, geographical boundaries tend to limit the benefits across countries.

The South-South Agriculture Alliance (SSAGA) – funded by the Gates Foundation – has been set up as an initiative to accelerate diffusion of agricultural innovations across the Global South and foster greater dialogue and collaboration. In pursuit of this, SSAGA will perform the functions of building a network of strategic and tactical partner stakeholders, engendering dialogue and precipitating action through periodic convenings, supporting innovative agriculture enterprises in scaling across geographical boundaries, and developing and disseminating learnings and good practices.

To date, SSAGA has onboarded a set of strategic partners (ThinkAg, ACELI Africa and Sustain Africa) – to guide and direct its functioning and several tactical partners to support enterprises in scaling across new geographies. It also plans to continuously engage stakeholders and generate & disseminate relevant knowledge. SSAGA is also supporting the first cohort of five Indian Agritech enterprises to scale in the target African geographies of Kenya, Rwanda and Tanzania.

SSAGA has the potential to impact the lives and livelihoods of over 600 million farmers across the Global South, scale beyond the India-Africa axis and provide a replicable model for other sectors.

Intellecap is implementing the South-South Agricultural Alliance (SSAGA) initiative to foster dialogue and facilitate the transfer of knowledge and innovations are across the Global South. The recent launch event in Kigali underscored the importance of such a platform and reinforced the need for continued collaboration and engagement among the larger agriculture community.