This report deals with innovation opportunities in the Rice Value Chain.

The following is a summary that introduces the report.

This report deals with selected innovations in Nigeria. 

The following is a summary that introduces the report.

This document ains to update the inventory of existing functional promising agricultural innovations in Nigeria. The salient results from this study are as follows: 116 technologies were identified nationally during the review period (2006-2014). The strongest or most frequent triggers of innovation include yield improvement, resistance to pests and diseases, wide ecological adaptation, high quality cassava flour, HQCF, shorter time to maturity, drought resistance, seed or grain colour, malting quality and grain weight or size.

This report make an study on the scaling up of agricultural innovations in Nigeria. The study has adopted different methods, concluding that the scaling up requires a multi-stakeholder approach among national governments, donor agencies, NGOs, the private sector, research institutions, and extension workers among others. In order to scaling the innovations to the end users, it is needed the combination of approaches outlined in this report

This document is designed to help researchers apply RCTs so they can gain a more accurate insight into the impacts of different extension strategies in different locations. It provides information on the benefits of an RCT approach in comparison to other impact evaluation models; provides a step-by-step implementation guide and a framework to avoid challenges; and demonstrates how an RCT approach was implemented within the context of the ‘Mind the Gap’ initiative.

This study analyse how agricultural extension can be made more effective in terms of increasing farmers’ adoption of pro-nutrition technologies, such as biofortified crops. In a randomised controlled trial with farmers in Kenya, the authors implemented several extension treatments and evaluated their effects on the adoption of beans biofortified with iron and zinc. Difference-in-difference estimates show that intensive agricultural training can increase technology adoption considerably.

There is an emerging body of literature analyzing how smallholder farmers in developing countries can benefit from modern supply chains. However, most of the available studies concentrate on export markets and fail to capture spillover effects that modern supply chains may have onlocal markets. Here, we analyze the case of sweet pepper in Thailand, which was initially introduced as a product innovation in modern supplychains, but which is now widely traded also in more traditional markets.

Agricultural innovations are seen as a key avenue to improve nutrition and health in smallholder farm households. But details of these agriculture-nutrition-health linkages are not yet well understood. While there is a broad literature on the adoption of agricultural technologies, most studies primarily focus on impacts in terms of productivity and income. Nutrition and health impacts have rarely been analyzed. In this article, we argue that future impact studies should include nutrition and health dimensions more explicitly.

Farm workers in developing countries often belong to the poorest of the poor. They typically face low wages, informal working arrangements, and inadequate social protection. Written employment contracts with clearly defined rights and obligations could possibly help, but it is not clear how such contracts could be introduced and promoted in traditional peasant environments. To address this question, we develop and implement a randomized controlled trial with farmers in Côte d’Ivoire.

Contract farming has gained in importance in many developing countries. Previous studies analysed effects of contracts on smallholder farmers’ welfare, yet mostlywithout considering that different types of contractual relationships exist. Here, we examine associations between contract farming and farm household income in the oilpalm sector of Ghana, explicitly differentiating between two types of contracts,namely simple marketing contracts and more comprehensive resource-providing contracts.