From Pilot to Systems Change: Rethinking How We Measure Circular Food Systems

“How do we really know if food systems are becoming more circular?”

It’s a question that more organizations are beginning to ask, and one that doesn’t have an easy answer. In our Circular Food Systems for Rwanda (CIRF) project, we track impact mostly at the level of individual businesses, capturing valuable but narrow insights. What’s often missing from these types of projects are practical ways to measure the system-level impacts that circularity promises such as reductions in waste and emissions, policy change, improved nutrition, and more resilient communities.

These challenges aren’t theoretical, they’re ones we’re confronting directly in the CIRF-project  pilot in Rwanda.

Looking Beyond the Pilot

As the CIRF project nears the completion of its pilot phase, the project partners hosted a Learning Event in October 2025 to reflect and envision what comes next. Our partners shared proud successes and insights from the project: SMEs with circular business models that increased revenues, created jobs, and new circular products, and examples of moving the needle on circular food systems policy through our multi-stakeholder policy platform, like Rwanda’s adoption of two ISO standards on circularity.

These experiences set the stage for a deeper reflection about what it will take to scale impact.

We now aim to take insights from the CIRF project and scale across other African countries over the next few years, establishing a replicable model for transformation through an initiative called Accelerating the Circular Economy for Food (ACE4Food). As we move from a pilot to a multi-country initiative, our ambition shifts from supporting individual enterprises to strengthening the work we are already doing in engaging Government Institutions and influencing policies, markets, and value chains. This makes systems-level measurement essential—not only to understand whether transformation is taking place, but also to ensure we avoid unintended trade-offs and reinforce change across value chain actors.

With scale in mind, we need to ensure that we are prepared to capture the systemic impact of our efforts.

Bringing Experts Together – Inside our Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) Impact Session

To explore these measurement challenges more intentionally, we convened peers and funders for a dedicated MEL discussion.

At the learning event, we dedicated significant time to explore the challenge of measuring whether agri-food systems are truly transforming. Our session brought together monitoring and evaluation experts from peer practitioners and funders to unpack challenges, share best practices, and explore how we can move toward a more aligned and meaningful way of measuring circular food systems.

Who we heard from:

• Nic Van Der Jagt, Monitoring, Learning, & Evaluation (MLE) Manager at IKEA Foundation
• Justine Mucyo, Agribusiness Specialist at IITA (RUNRES project)
• Gloria Kantegwa, MLE Specialist at WRI Rwanda (CIRF project)
• Eugenie Uwimana, MEL Advisor at SNV
• Shannon Patty-Stoddard, MEL Advisor at Resonance, session moderator 

Summary of Panel Insights:

The panel discussed challenges such as the resource-intensive nature of collecting quantitative data on waste and emissions, the disproportionate burden placed on entrepreneurs and small farmers, and the difficulty of attributing results to specific interventions or projects/programs.

Most panel participants acknowledged that they haven't yet achieved the right balance between individual and systems-level impact measurements. However, current efforts are concentrated on policy changes, with the long-term aspiration of broader systemic evaluation.

Key obstacles include the lack of collective measurement frameworks and user friendly tools across programs and the uncertainty around how to track complex changes like in market dynamics and policy adoption. Participants discussed practical solutions including building SME capacity for self-monitoring, leveraging Multi-Stakeholder Platforms to influence government policy alignment (particularly with Rwanda's NDCs), and shifting from attribution to contribution models that harvest outcomes and signs of change.

From Talk to Tools: Practical Ways to Measure System-Level Transformation

Despite these challenges, our panelists highlighted several approaches that offer promising pathways forward, such as outcomes harvesting, contribution analysis and market systems framework among others. 

Outcomes Harvesting

This method works well when results are unpredictable, conditions are rapidly changing, or key variables are unknown. The process typically starts by collecting stories of change across stakeholders, verifying those changes, and then identifying how your intervention contributed. At an individual level, these might include changes in knowledge, behavior, skills, or business metrics. At the system level, they may include shifts in relationships, rules, dynamics, or broader patterns.

Contribution Analysis

This approach mirrors the outcome harvesting process but is anchored in a theory of change. It asks whether the intervention followed the expected pathway and contributed to the expected outcomes, assigning credibility to the program’s role. For systems-level change, contribution pathways are more diffuse, often requiring documentation of behavioral or relational shifts and consideration of alternative explanations including political turnover or other external forces.

Market Systems Framework

Rather than a specific tool or method for measurement, this lens maps and characterizes relationships, transactions, incentives and rules across a value chain. It often relies on outcome harvesting, social network analysis and emphasizes incremental, sense-making processes to capture change.

What Signals of Systems Change Might Look Like

Building on these approaches, panelists and audience members dispersed into groups to discuss a central question: if a food system is becoming more circular, what would we actually expect to see?

Across perspectives, several themes emerged of early “signals” that can hint at whether circularity is beginning to take root in a system long before major policy milestones or market shifts appear.

1. Changing Behaviors and Norms: Participants emphasized that many systemic changes begin with people, rather than policies. Signals might include growing consumer interest in circular products, farmers becoming more aware of circular practices, or knowledge-sharing spreading organically through communities. These changes often show up first in attitudes and relationships before hard numbers.
2. Environmental Practices as the Default: Early indicators of environmental transformation are often subtle, like more farmers adopting waste-to-value practices, improvements in water use and recycling, or local experimentation with regenerative inputs. These shifts point to a system where circularity is no longer a niche idea but part of routine practice.
3. Market Evolution: Economic signals like increased commercialization of circular products, new financing models, or financial institutions showing stronger understanding of circularity suggest the market is beginning to reward circular behavior. These signals don’t require massive industry overhauls, they often start as small but telling adjustments in incentives.
4. Governance and Policy Alignment: Many agreed that the strongest signals of systems change often appear in the enabling environment. This includes circularity showing up in the language of public officials, broadening participation in multi-stakeholder platforms, or new policy proposals aligned with circular economy goals. The challenge is that these signals are often incremental and difficult to capture before formal policies are enacted.
5. Multi-Dimensionality: A recurring risk surfaced in conversation of the risk in over-indexing on one domain (e.g. economic growth) and missing unintended trade-offs. Genuine systems change must show coherence across social, environmental, and economic progress rather than spikes in one area.

Why These Signals Matter

Each indicator, on its own, does not confirm systems transformation. But in combination, they help practitioners sense whether circularity is beginning to take root and where reinforcing interventions may be needed. They also reflect the reality that systems change is often detectable long before it can be conclusively measured.

The Work Continues: Toward Shared Understanding of Circular Impact

Taken together, these insights underscore a common theme: we are still at the early stages of building shared systems-level measurement approaches. This session built on the success that circularity projects have had at the SME and policy level and pushes toward the larger ambition of systems transformation. This new lens makes clear that we do not yet have the tools or the frameworks to measure circularity at scale, but we are beginning to co-create them.  

Ultimately, answering the question we started with, “How do we know if agri-food systems are becoming more circular?” will require collaboration and shared learning. At this next stage, measuring systems change, rather than only individual outcomes will be essential to understanding whether our work is contributing to real transformation.

We leave our readers with several questions:  

•         What does systemic change look like in your context?
•         What would demonstrate transformative change to you in agri-food systems?
•         What tools and lenses can help circular interventions monitor systems level outcomes and impacts?

With so many interventions working towards similar goals in the same region, we want to continue exploring how best to align, coordinate and accelerate circular food systems transformation. Please reach out to Gloria Kantengwa, Shayna Krasnoff, or Steve Schmida, to talk more about our vision for systems-level circular transformation with ACE4Food.