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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.