This document is a brief description of the project "Pejeriz: Rice, entrepreneurship and jobs in West Africa". The project aims to building and strengthening entrepreneurial capacities of rural youth, creating market linkages and promoting value-adding activities for rural youth in the rice value chains of Mali and Senegal. The capacity-building efforts will develop a pool of young professionals with the competence and skills to engage in sustainable business along the rice value chain

This paper comparatively analyzes the structure of agricultural policy development networks that connect organizations working on agricultural development, climate change and food security in fourteen smallholder farming communities across East Africa, West Africa and South Asia.

Connecting science with policy has always been challenging for both scientists and policy makers. In Ghana, Mali and Senegal, multi-stakeholder national science-policy dialogue platforms on climate-smart agriculture (CSA) were setup to use scientificevidence to create awareness of climate change impacts on agriculture andadvocate for the mainstreaming of climate change and CSA into agriculturaldevelopment plans.