Curriculum for training of Multi-actors Agricultural Innovation Platform facilitators

Mult-actors Agricultural Innovation Platform (MAIP) is established in rural communities where farmers and key value chain actors become empowered through participatory action research, knowledge co-creation and application, market linkages and so on. MAIPs, as a model for inclusive and collaborative innovation, are increasingly deployed in farmer communities to solve the last-mile bottleneck, namely, the empowerment of smallholder farmers and value chain actors to access innovation and services to drive field-level change. MAIP has been preliminarily tested and piloted in several FAO field projects and demonstrated great potential for scale-up. Field results showed that MAIPs facilitated small-scale producers, family farmers and other agrifood system actors to generate and access context-specific agricultural innovations and services. Facilitation has proved crucial for stimulating and underpinning interactions among MAIP actors. This is the key to supporting co-innovation and co-learning processes and enabling individuals or organizations to reflect on their experience and encourage critical thinking. Qualified MAIP facilitators, as value chain intermediaries and coordinators, usually come from specialized MAIP actors (e.g. researchers, extension agents, agricultural educationists, private-sector brokers, non-governmental organization (NGO) activists, traders and processors). They are normally trained through the specially designed training of MAIP facilitator course or through the implementation of a MAIP. This curriculum draws on the experience of the training course “Training of master trainers for establishing and operating Multi-actors Agricultural Innovation Platforms” co-organized by FAO and CAU on 11–15 July 2023. It serves as a useful tool for empowering MAIP facilitators to play a critical role in establishing and operating MAIPs.