This book is about the challenges and practical realities of building the capacity to innovate. It describes the experiences of the Research Into Use (RIU) programme, a five-year, multi-country investment by DFID that aimed to extract development impact from past investments in agricultural research. Specifically, it explores different approaches through which innovation capacities were built. One approach was to establish and support innovation platforms (IPs) – an approach increasingly advocated as a way to broker linkages and facilitate interaction between multiple stakeholders in order to enable agricultural innovation. Originally, IPs were intended to help put existing research findings into use for developmental purposes in Africa. The purpose of this book is to describe lessons from these experiences for practitioners and policy-makers in the national and international arenas who are planning and implementing investments to enable agricultural innovation.
These proceedings include all the papers presented during the AISA workshop either as oral papers or as posters. It also includes the edited text resulting from the Living Keynote process, an innovation in itself.
The AISA workshop was held...
The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the role that benchmarking can play in rural and agricultural innovations. Although generally known as 'traditional sector', rural activities are far from static but rather driven by old and new challenges pleading...
Ce guide est né d’une demande de paysans africains qui souhaitaient s’engager dans des pratiques agricoles plus respectueuses de leur environnement et plus durables. Il a été conçu comme un outil d’accompagnement destiné à tous les paysans et techniciens souhaitant...
This book documents a study on the concept of Integrated Agricultural Research for Development (IAR4D) that was developed by the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA). The IAR4D concept forms the basis for the Sub-Saharan Africa Challenge Programme (SSA...
This short note discusses the innovation platforms in their potential functions and benefits, with references to southern Africa countries. The initial consideration is that, although appropriate technologies and farming strategies to increase production in small-scale crop-livestock systems exist, farmers often...
