This booklet contains fifteen short stories told by field staff of the 2SCALE project about their personal experiences on how their work impacted a particular person or group. The booklet results from a regional review and capitalisation workshop that was organised in Benin in March 2017 within the framework of the 2SCALE programme. 2SCALE (Towards Sustainable Clusters in Agribusiness through Learning in Entrepreneurship) is a major agribusiness incubator programme implemented since 2012, and is aimed at promoting inclusive agribusiness partnerships in nine African countries.
The findings of a Nigerian case study discussed in this paper indicate that the notion of wives of leisure is really not applicable to most women in Nigeria, as women have always worked. Even those in purdah engage in income generating activities within the confines of the compound. It is therefore wasteful to continue to by-pass or displace women in development. Selective mechanisation of difficult processes in agriculture could become a useful method of integrating women into, and enhancing their contributions to, development.
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.
LenCD has prepared a joint statement on results and capacity development (presented in this publication), which stresses that meaningful, sustainable results are premised on proper investments in capacity development and that these results materialize at different levels and at different times, along countries’ development trajectory. To provide evidence in support of this statement, LenCD launched a call for submission of stories.
This paper looks at brokerage functions in a project on building innovation capacity through improved networking. Innovation capacity influences how actors respond to changes in their environments. In such dynamic environments well connected sets of actors are at an advantage in that they can combine skills to address the emerging opportunities and challenges. However, policy and cultural barriers especially in African innovation systems raise the transaction costs of networking leading to weak connectivity among actors thus poor innovation capacity.
Successful cases of innovation invariably demonstrate a range of partnerships, alliances and network-like arrangements that connect together knowledge users, knowledge producers and others involved in enabling innovation in the market, policy and civil society arenas. With this comes the realisation that public agricultural research needs to strengthen links to a wider set of players from the private and civil society sectors and, of course, farmers themselves. Public agricultural extension services have traditionally played the role of linking farmers to technology.
Fairtrade certification has recently gained in importance for various export crops produced in developing countries. One of Fairtrade's main objectives is to improve the social conditions of smallholder farmers. Previous research showed that Fairtrade has positive effects on farmers' sales prices and incomes in many situations. However, more detailed analysis of the effects on food security and other dimensions of household living standard is rare.
Postharvest loss exacerbates the food insecurity and welfare loss of farming households in developing countries. This paper analyses the effect of improved storage, a climate-smart crop management technology, on household food and nutrition security, market participation and welfare using nationally representative data from Ethiopia. Endogenous switching regression models are employed to control for selection bias and unobserved heterogeneity.
This white paper has been prepared to support consultations on the content and structure of the FAO National Medium Term Priority Framework for India. It is intended to be an authoritative report on the issues facing food and agriculture in India and on the capacity of FAO to partner with India in addressing priorities identified by India.
This paper traces the evolution of the innovation systems framework within the agricultural sector in Sub-Saharan Africa, and presents a conceptual framework for agricultural innovation systems. The difference between innovation ecology/ecosystems and intervention-based innovations systems is highlighted, given that these two concepts are used at different levels in promoting and sustaining agricultural innovations.