Agri-innovations are mostly delivered to farmers through private and public sector-led institutions around the world, with various degrees of success in Malawi. These distribution systems, on the other hand, do not meet everyone's production and productivity needs, particularly those of smallholder farmers. Alternative gap-filling systems are therefore required. Over the course of 7 years, we performed two studies in Malawi to assess the efficiency of integrated farmer led agri-innovation delivery mechanisms, in order to advise programming and delivery improvements. The first study looked at the impact of farmer-led technology delivery on agricultural output and productivity. It was split into two phases: learning (2010–2015) and scaling-out (2016–2019). The second study looked at how smallholder farmers changed their behaviour, after receiving instruction during the scaling-out phase. A farmer-led social network, community seed banks, was used as the research platform.