South-South cooperation has been a key pillar of the development agenda for more than two decades, becoming an important tool for mutual action and technological advancement among countries of the Global South. As participants sought to include Northern countries in these efforts, the concept of triangular cooperation emerged.
South-South triangular cooperation (SSTC) is a key approach in efforts to transform food systems. The July 2025 United Nations Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) stocktaking conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, advocated SSTC as a tool for exchanging technologies and knowledge across the Global South, saying it can be a prime driver in development cooperation.
IFPRI and other CGIAR centers around the world are well-positioned to advance SSTC efforts. Their extensive global and regional research networks, experience, and knowledge base are powerful tools that can be leveraged in international cooperation for food system transformation.
One CGIAR has identified SSTC as a key priority for its Capacity Sharing Accelerator, a global collaboration between international agricultural research institutions, including the World Bank and UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and countries of the Global South. An August 1, 2025 workshop organized by the CapSha Accelerator and facilitated by ICRISAT’s Center of Excellence for South-South Cooperation in Agriculture (ISSCA) focused on such efforts. This post outlines the broad opportunities for SSTC and key takeaways from the workshop.
Major opportunities for South-South triangular cooperation
As countries in the Global South have grown more reluctant to rely heavily on development assistance from the North (and that assistance has waned), South-South cooperation has been steadily expanding. For example, cooperation between the African Union (AU) and China regarding development in Africa has gained significant momentum. The number of research collaborations from Chinese universities and African institutions has been increasing, as has the number of scholarships that African students are obtaining from Chinese universities. Another example is India’s Development and Knowledge Sharing Initiative (DAKSHIN), a network of about 150 institutions across 113 countries.
Working with CGIAR centers through the CapSha Accelerator can provide significant benefits for such South-South partnerships, and such SSTC efforts have been expanding into increasingly robust collaborative frameworks.
Making SSTC effective
If SSTC is to be broadly effective, countries must take stock of current SSTC efforts and the lessons they offer, in part to avoid past pitfalls. Research and innovation platforms that operate regionally across the Global South—such as the CGIAR Science Programs—provide ideal venues for participating countries to develop best practices for international cooperation.
Yet, over the past four decades, many SSTC efforts lacked broad political support or sometimes even a specific purpose. As a result, they were often seen as reflecting ideas imposed from the outside and could not be sustained after individual projects came to an end. In the emerging SSTC paradigm, partners seek to anchor programs within a set of cooperative principles driven by international engagement policies and country strategies.
National agricultural research and innovation systems (NARIS) should play a central role in developing and selecting SSTC projects and interventions. In the past, implementing agencies often carried the SSTC agenda largely based on the availability of donor funding, glossing over key national priorities.
Thus, it is important to understand how institutions within individual countries can help to coordinate action across sectors and facilitate international cooperation. At the same time, the priorities of NARIS and those of external partners have often been misaligned. To be effective enablers of SSTC, those groups should establish a process of give and take and clarify their goals in any international cooperation.
Sharing knowledge and capacity is another important challenge. What are the best ways to combine and synthesize the knowledge generated by national systems with that of international research efforts such as CGIAR Science Programs? A starting point is a country-level needs assessment to identify where national research efforts can benefit from international system knowledge and vice versa.
Specific lessons and the way forward
Programs such as the CGIAR CapSha Accelerator can be key players in efforts to share knowledge and foster partnerships between countries and with global and regional organizations such as the ten-member BRICS and the seven-member Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC). This will increase the likelihood of sustainable outcomes and impacts.
The CapSha Accelerator can also partner directly with regional networks and associations focused on agricultural research, extension, and education, including the Asia Pacific Association of Agricultural Research Institutions (APAARI), the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA), and the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA).
ICRISAT’s current model for collaboration in South Asia is a good model for the CapSha Accelerator’s SSTC efforts. ISSCA and the DAKSHIN Global South Centre of Excellence have worked together to develop SSTC programs focusing on agriculture, health, digital solutions, education, and science and technology. Similar regional partnerships focused on CGIAR centers in different countries will help speed up the process of SSTC implementation under the CapSha Accelerator.
The CapSha Accelerator can also play a key brokering role in implementing partnerships between the individual NARIS of participating countries, which can benefit from the CGIAR knowledge base.
That should be part of a broader effort across the capacity-sharing programs of each of the CGIAR centers and CGIAR Science Programs to provide access to their knowledge base to countries that need it. SSTC can play a role in opening such access through programs such as the ICRISAT Dryland Academy and the IITA Breeding Academy.
The expanding global and regional efforts in SSTC offer an important opportunity for the CapSha Accelerator, and CGIAR centers and programs more generally, to help countries in the urgent work of food system transformation. Such efforts will broaden the reach of valuable research and programmatic knowledge and help speed up the changes in agricultural practice, climate mitigation, nutrition, and other areas the world will need in the coming decades.
Suresh Chandra Babu is a Research Fellow Emeritus with IFPRI’s Director General’s Office; Kumara Charyulu Deevi is a Senior Scientist in Agricultural Economics at ICRISAT. Opinions are the authors’.
