Their Purpose
Agriculture has the power to sustain us all.
Realizing this power is dependent on equitable access to tools, products, and practices that increase productivity, support nutrition security, and build resilience against threats like climate change.
It’s time to close the agricultural innovation gap for good.
Gates Ag One believes that all lives have equal value and was created to accelerate the most promising agricultural innovations being made available to those who need them most: smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
Their multidisciplinary team brings decades of practical experience in product development and technical and regulatory support to Gates Ag One. As a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, their work was designed to be complementary and based on shared values.
Gates Ag One’s Open Innovation Network aims to further inform, accelerate, and — in due course — sustain an innovation ecosystem for the future. The goal is to create customized solutions for smallholders that continue to evolve with their changing needs.
To do so, they commit to work collaboratively and transparently and stay razor-focused on maximizing their impact.
As Gates Ag One, they strive to bring about a world where agriculture becomes an ever-greater sustainable solution to the systemic challenges the world is facing.
What They Do
Design. Build. Test. Repeat.
Gates Ag One works with their Open Innovation Network partners to develop breakthrough agricultural products — collaboratively evaluating, de-risking, and advancing the best science to improve smallholder livelihoods and the communities they feed. We focus on the crops and regions where their impact can be greatest.
Plant Biology as a Natural Solution
Plant science research can sustainably transform a crop’s productivity and its adaptive capacity to climate stress for smallholder farmers. The stakes are high, and there is no time to lose.
Demand for smallholder-focused innovation is already substantial — and increasing. One in four people on the planet will live in sub-Saharan Africa by 2050, yet yields on the continent are only 15-20 percent of those in similar growing regions.
Despite this, conventional research and development often neglects the priorities and needs of smallholders if the risk is too high or the road to commercialization too uncertain. Gates Ag One uses patient capital and their unique convening power to change this.
Their Principles
As an accelerator, we are driven by the stark challenges that smallholder farmers face in cultivating crops under increasingly uncertain and difficult conditions. We are also propelled by optimism and driven by our mission to develop improved crops for smallholders and reduce the “time to market” for them to access, and benefit from, these innovations.
Partnerships are essential to our work. Through our Open Innovation Network, we aim to convene a network of partners bridging sectors and markets. These alliances will help us co-develop cutting-edge, improved varieties and build an enabling environment to ensure they can reach smallholder farmers.
At every step, we aim to advance smallholder farmers accessing improved crops that meet their specific needs. Only when smallholders and our local partners inform our research priorities, will our efforts be meaningful and reflect how issues like climate change, poverty, and gender inequality affect their lives and livelihoods.
