African agriculture is currently at a crossroads, at which persistent food shortages are compounded by threats from climate change. But, as this book argues, Africa can feed itself in a generation and help contribute to global food security. To achieve this Africa has to define agriculture as a force in economic growth by: advancing scientific and technological research; investing in infrastructure; fostering higher technical training; and creating regional markets.

Land and property rights, migration, and citizenship are complex issues that cut across all social, economic, and political spheres of West Africa. This paper provides an overarching scoping of the most pressing contemporary issues related to land, migration, and citizenship, including how they intersect in various contexts and locations in West Africa. The way issues are analytically framed captures structural challenges and sets them against the regional and global meta-trends of which policy makers and practitioners should be aware for conflict-sensitive planning.

This study focused on analysing the determinants of farmer participation in direct marketing channels using the case of the cassava sector in the Oyo State of Nigeria. The Bivariate Tobit model was applied in the empirical analysis, based on a primary dataset generated from 400 rural cassava farmers from the Oyo State of Nigeria. The main objective of this study was to analyse the effects of the determinants of farmer decision to either participate in the processor or middlemen marketing channels in the Oyo State of Nigeria.

This brief summarizes a report on the first large survey of maize traders in Nigeria in the past several decades. The sample of about 1400 traders covered one state in the South and four in the North, with traders in city wholesale markets in the North (Jos, Kaduna, Kano, Katsina) and South (Ibadan) and regional markets in secondary cities in the North.

The cassava system in Nigeria is developing, with increasing attention to its potential positive outcomes. However, credit access is a major problem in expanding productive activities of the different actors across the value chains of cassava products. This study investigates the extent of access to credit by cassava actors with respect to the different financial institutions in the country using data obtained from a sample of 168 actors, including producers, processors, marketers, fabricators and end users

This synthesis report presents the outputs of the workshop organised by CTA at its headquarters in Wageningen, The Netherlands, 15-17 July 2008.  The outputs are presented in two main parts, each corresponding to one of the workshop objectives, and ends with a section on the way forward as suggested by the workshop participants. It also includes a first attempt to come to a consolidated generic framework on AIS performance indicators, based on the outputs of the different working groups.

This paper examines different practical methods for stakeholders to analyse power dynamics in multi-stakeholders processes (MSPs), taking into account the ambiguous and uncertain nature of complex adaptive systems. It reflects on an action learning programme which focused on 12 cases in Africa and Asia put forward by 6 Dutch development non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

This review studied a selection of projects from the Research Into Use (RIU) Africa portfolio: the Nyagatare maize platform in Rwanda; the cowpea platform in Kano state, Nigeria; the pork platform in Malawi, the Farm Input Promotions (FIPS) Best Bet in Kenya, and the Armyworm Best Bet in Kenya and Tanzania. For each of the selected projects, assessments were made on how it changed the capacity to innovate, the household level poverty impact, whether the intervention off ered value for money, and what were the main lessons learned.

This paper briefly reviews three conceptual frameworks: namely, the national agricultural research system (NARS), the agricultural knowledge and information system (AKIS) and the agricultural innovation system (AIS) concepts. Next, the paper reviews the definition of ‘innovation’ and proposes that agricultural innovation can occur at four different but interlinked domains.

This review seeks to assess the usefulness of innovation systems approaches in the context of the Integrated Agricultural Research for Development (IAR4D) in guiding research agendas, generating knowledge and use in improving food security and nutrition, reducing poverty and generating cash incomes for resource-poor farmers. The report draws on a range of case studies across sub-Saharan Africa to compare and contrast the reasons for success from which lessons can be learned.