Nathanial Peterson
Nathanial Peterson is a Behavioral Economist focused on last-mile delivery systems and risk management for rural households. His work examines how behavioral science can be applied to strengthen the effectiveness, adaptability, and learning capacity of rural service delivery models—particularly those involving agent-based networks and technology adoption among smallholder farmers.
As co-lead of the CGIAR Food Systems Accelerator (CFSA), Nate works with growth-stage agribusinesses across sub-Saharan Africa to address persistent challenges in rural uptake of agricultural innovations. These include limited product adoption, weak agent performance, and low trust in new technologies—challenges that frequently stem not from technical design flaws, but from behavioral bottlenecks in implementation systems.
To address these issues at scale, he directs EMBE, a Gates Foundation–supported initiative focused on behavioral optimization for rural delivery. EMBE collaborates with implementing partners to diagnose frictions in agent-based systems, run field experiments, and improve delivery outcomes by introducing behaviorally informed segmentation, incentive structures, and data-driven feedback loops. The program helps organizations move from static delivery models to adaptive, learning-centered systems that respond to real-time behavioral data.
Dr. Peterson’s broader research and applied work includes systems transformation, last-mile innovation scaling and knowledge transfer mechanisms. Through his involvement in defining the IGAD Innovation Hub, he supports regional actors in designing more adaptive livestock and climate resilience systems.
He has also developed and led a series of Bootcamps for Agricultural Enterprises, designed to help agri-SMEs and development partners solve specific operational bottlenecks. These bootcamps are built on structured diagnostics and experimentation methods, with a particular focus on improving investment readiness, rural distribution models, and impact measurement systems.
A recent module, under development with the Pan-Africa Bean Research Alliance (PABRA) and the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), provides applied training for seed companies and input providers across 30 countries. It combines EMBE’s behavioral analytics with PABRA’s deep expertise in varietal adoption to redesign agent training, sales incentives, and data systems in support of improved uptake of climate-resilient crops.
Across all his work, Nate is committed to building delivery systems that are not only technically sound but also behaviorally intelligent—capable of learning, adapting, and operating with greater proximity to the people they aim to serve. His current focus is on enabling agricultural innovations at scale by closing the execution gap through applied behavioral science and rigorous experimentation.
