In 2024, I found myself sitting under a tree in rural Malawi, listening to a group of farmers discuss their visions for the future. Some spoke about building permanent homes. Others wanted livestock, irrigation pumps, thriving businesses or better opportunities for their children. What struck me was not the visions themselves, but something deeper: many participants said it was the first time they had openly discussed these aspirations as families and communities. I found participants often happy to try new innovations and practices, but there was a lack of communication within households on how these can be adopted. This limited understanding, even among researchers, of how to create safe spaces for households and communities to envision a sustainable future through innovation adoption made research design a more complex task.
Discovering the missing link between technology and transformation
At the time, I was leading the implementation of the Gender Action Learning System (GALS) under the CGIAR Ukama Ustawi Initiative. The initiative, led by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) worked on diversifying maize-based systems in 13 countries within East and Southern Africa. GALS supports households and communities to address gender discriminatory practices and structures. The objective was clear — to create safe spaces that would support the adoption of conservation agriculture and other climate-smart agriculture practices by women, men and youth. Yet as the process unfolded, it became evident that GALS was doing much more than supporting technology uptake. It was transforming how people thought, planned, negotiated and made decisions about their futures.
Working across communities in Balaka, Nkhotakota, Salima, Dowa, Machinga and Zomba, we reached more than 4,000 smallholder farmers through a cascading approach involving GALS Champions, household trainers and community members. Participants used four core steps: Vision Journey, Gender Balance Tree, Challenge Action Tree and Social Empowerment Mapping to analyze their realities and chart pathways toward their desired futures. These steps focus on finding realistic solutions to challenges and facilitates discussions around decision-making, ownership, and control over household assets. As I observed the process, an important gap emerged.
Reimagining GALS for research and innovation adoption
While GALS was highly effective in facilitating dialogue, challenging gender norms and promoting collective action, researchers lacked a structured way to use the methodology for research design, monitoring, evidence generation and learning. The original methodology was not developed as a research tool. It helped communities identify challenges and act on them, but it did not explicitly guide researchers on how to co-design questions, analyze transformative outcomes or develop indicators with participants. This gap became increasingly apparent as communities began using GALS to discuss conservation agriculture adoption, irrigation technologies, livelihood diversification and climate resilience. That realization became the starting point for developing the updated research tool: GALS for Gender Transformative Research (GALS4GTR).
Building GALS4GTR from a community practice to a CGIAR toolkit
Rather than replacing GALS, the aim was to build on its strengths. Together with colleagues and partners, we adapted the methodology into a participatory research pathway that integrates community-led visioning, gender analysis, challenge identification, network mapping, and participatory monitoring, evaluation, learning, impact assessment, and adjustment (P-MELIAA). GALS4GTR enables researchers to move beyond data extraction toward genuine co-design and knowledge co-creation with communities.
The tool was subsequently developed and published as part of the CGIAR Gender-Transformative Research Methodologies Toolkit, with support from the CGIAR Gender Equality and Inclusion Accelerator and funding from the CGIAR Scaling for Impact (S4I) Program, which supported piloting and refinement efforts in Malawi.
Lessons from more than 4,000 households
Through a learning assessment conducted under the CGIAR Scaling for Impact Program, we examined how GALS influenced innovation adoption and transformative outcomes among 1,417 participants representing more than 4,095 households that had previously participated in the Malawi intervention. The results demonstrated the remarkable power of community-led learning. Findings showed strong diffusion of knowledge and peer-to-peer learning within communities, enabling participants to share experiences and spread innovations more widely. The approach also contributed to increased joint decision-making within households, fostering more inclusive participation in livelihood and agricultural decisions.
In addition, women and youth reported higher levels of confidence and leadership, empowering them to take on more active roles within their households and communities. Participants were more likely to adopt irrigation technologies, conservation agriculture practices, tree planting and other climate-smart innovations. The intervention also helped to reduce gender barriers, improve household relationships, enhance access to productive assets and decrease the incidence of gender-based violence.
Importantly, these social changes translated into innovation uptake. For example, in Malawi, across the districts of Dowa, Nkhotakota, Salima, Balaka, Machinga and Zomba, participants adopted climate-smart practices at remarkable levels. Nine out every ten participants took up manure application and tree planting, crop rotation and irrigation technologies. Many households linked these changes directly to the confidence, planning skills and collective problem-solving capacities developed through GALS. These results now define the piloting of GALS in Zambia under the S4I program and the Water and Soil Accelerator project.
Why this matters for responsible and inclusive scaling impact
For me, one of the most important lessons from this journey is that scaling innovations is not only about technologies. It is about people.
Innovations such as conservation agriculture, irrigation, mechanization, financial services or market systems succeed when people have the agency, relationships and confidence to make decisions about their adoption. Creating safe spaces for dialogue often becomes the first step toward creating enabling environments for innovation.
Today, GALS4GTR provides researchers and development practitioners with a practical pathway for embedding gender-transformative approaches into research and innovation processes. More importantly, it offers a way to ensure that communities are not merely participants in research but active partners in designing the futures they want to build.
As CGIAR Scaling for Impact program continues to advance responsible and inclusive scaling across food, land and water systems, the lessons from Malawi and now in Zambia remind us that transformative change rarely starts with technology alone.
It starts with a conversation.
And sometimes, that conversation begins under a tree, with a simple question: What future do you want to create?
