June 1, 2026
By Bram Govaerts, Director General, CIMMYT
Over the past year, my conversations with investors, government partners, and colleagues working in the field have followed a recognizable pattern. They are collegial, substantive, and almost inevitably arrive at some version of the same question: how are things really going? What lies behind it is not idle curiosity but something more searching, a genuine uncertainty about whether institutions like ours are actually delivering, and whether the commitments we make can be trusted when the conditions that shaped them have changed so drastically.
I welcome the question, because it demands honesty rather than marketing. The candid answer is that we are navigating real and, in some cases, severe constraints, but from a position of institutional clarity that has been deliberately built over recent years.
The Uses of Uncertainty
When CIMMYT extended its reach across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, we resisted the institutional temptation to project false confidence onto environments that did not warrant it. What we did instead was deliberate and genuinely uncommon: we stress-tested the strategy by constructing several plausible futures and asked ourselves with rigor whether our approach could remain effective across the full range of what we might reasonably face.
This was not an abstract planning exercise, and 2025 proved the point. Funding shifted in ways that would have caught a less-prepared organization flat-footed, investor priorities evolved, and the political landscape around development assistance became appreciably more difficult. Our planning held, not because we had predicted the future with any particular precision, but because we had built the kind of adaptive resilience that does not depend on certainty.
The Institutional Architecture of Trust
Governance structures, risk management frameworks, and compliance systems rarely generate enthusiasm at investor conferences, and I harbor no illusions that they should. But they are, in the most practical sense, what makes it possible for an institution of our scale and footprint to operate with the kind of integrity that transforms trust from a claim into something verifiable.
When an investor commits resources to CIMMYT, they are funding something more than a research agenda. They are investing in a system of accountability, and it matters that they understand what that system actually looks like. Over several years, we have worked systematically to strengthen an integrated combined assurance system: a structure that improves oversight across the full breadth of our portfolio, increases visibility where opacity might otherwise arise, and builds stakeholder confidence that cannot be generated by communications strategies alone.
The architecture rests on three mutually reinforcing functions. Ethics, Business Conduct, and Compliance ensure that our conduct meets the highest standards expected in the field, not as a minimum threshold but as an organizing principle. Enterprise Risk Management gives us the analytical capacity to anticipate difficulties and reach informed decisions in environments where information is imperfect, which is to say, most environments. Internal Audit provides the independent verification that external partners and internal leadership alike require to have genuine confidence in our controls and performance. These are not separate administrative silos; they operate as a single coordinated system in which each function strengthens the others, drawn together by an Independent Combined Assurance Coordinator who ensures coverage is coherent, gaps are identified early, and duplication is minimized without displacing the independent reporting lines each function requires.
This internal architecture is further reinforced through independent external audit, and we are also establishing an Independent Ombudsperson function, as an additional safe space to voice grievances, access impartial guidance, and as a trusted channel to complement formal reporting lines.
How Institutional Confidence Is Built
A system’s architecture only matters if what flows through it is reliable. Risk intelligence, compliance data, and audit findings converge into a coherent picture of organizational health that informs decisions at both management and Board level. The consequence is earlier detection of emerging problems and more considered responses, shaped by a fuller understanding of the institution’s actual condition rather than the partial view any single function would provide.
Underpinning it all is professional independence. Auditors, compliance officers, and risk managers who are free from the pressures they are supposed to check will surface problems that others would prefer to overlook. And when issues are surfaced, what determines whether an institution truly learns from them is not the sophistication of its systems but the culture those systems operate within, one that treats honest diagnosis not as a liability but as the most reliable path to improvement.
Partnership as Strategy
What has sustained our effectiveness through this period of constraint is a deliberate effort to deepen strategic partnerships. Within the CGIAR system and well beyond it, we work alongside governments, private sector actors, and national research institutions that may be better positioned than we are to reach farmers directly, adapt solutions to local conditions, and maintain the kind of long-run presence that produces lasting results.
The Discipline of Learning
The aspect of our organizational development I find most consequential is the effort we have made to ensure that we genuinely learn from experience rather than simply accumulate it. Our monitoring and evaluation systems are now configured to feed findings directly into program design, so that evidence of what is and is not working shapes subsequent decisions rather than only being catalogued in reports.
The practice is considerably more demanding than the principle. Organizational learning requires acknowledging what went wrong, tolerating the reputational exposure that comes with candor, and giving teams sufficient autonomy to experiment in ways that may not succeed. Organizations that cannot do these things accumulate experience and repeat mistakes, without learning.
A Word to Those Who Have Invested
For those who have committed resources to CIMMYT, I want to be direct. You have helped strengthen an institution designed with considerable care to ensure that resources reach farmers, that the work they make possible is scientifically rigorous, and that when things go wrong, as they inevitably do, the institution has the capacity to recognize it honestly and respond effectively.
We can tell you with reasonable precision what role we play in the broader ecosystem, how we would respond if our funding environment shifted further, and where the boundaries of our knowledge currently lie and what we are actively doing to push those boundaries outward.
This is what staying the course looks like in a changing world: disciplined preparation, resilience, and a commitment to learn, adapt, and deliver with confidence.
Topics
Species
