Given the diversity and context-specificity of innovation systems approaches, in March 2007 the World Bank organized a workshop in which about 80 experts (representing donor agencies, development and related agencies, academia, and the World Bank) took stock of recent experiences with innovation systems in agriculture and reconsidered strategies for their future development. This paper summarizes the workshop findings and uses them to develop and discuss key issues in applying the innovation systems concept. The workshop’s recommendations, including next steps for the wider

Innovation systems can be defined in a variety of ways: they can be national, regional, sectoral, or technological. They all involve the creation, diffusion, and use of knowledge. Systems consist of components, relationships among these, and their characteristics or attributes. The focus of this paper is on the analytical and methodological issues arising from various system concepts. There are three issues that stand out as problematic. First, what is the appropriate level of analysis for the purpose at hand?

The Conceptual Background provides an in-depth analysis of the conceptual underpinnings and principles of the TAP Common Framework. It is also available in French and Spanish.

Feeding an additional three billion people over the next four decades, along with providing food security for another one billion people that are currently hungry or malnourished, is a huge challenge. Meeting those goals in a context of land and water scarcity, climate change, and declining crop yields will require another giant leap in agricultural innovation. The aim of this paper is to stimulate a dialogue on what new approaches might be needed to meet these needs and how innovative funding mechanisms could play a role.

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.

Farmers Training Center (FTC)-based farmer training is an emerging extension strategy geared towards human capital development through need-based, hands-on practical training in order to facilitate agricultural transformation and rural livelihood improvement. Although FTCs were established and made functional in the Tigray National Regional State and Alamata Woreda no systematic assessment of the relevance and effectiveness of the training were made.

The Africa Leadership Training and Capacity Building Program (Africa Lead), aims to support the capacity building program of the US Government’s Feed the Future Initiative, which aligns U.S. Government development assistance with Africa-owned agriculture development plans that are, in turn, aligned with the African Union’s Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Program.

This publication describes the activities carried out in the tripartite event ‘Transforming Nutrition-Sensitive Value Chain Development in the Pacific Islands.” It was implemented by the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) in collaboration with MORDI Tonga Trust, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the Pacific Islands Private Sector Organisation (PIPSO). The document starts discussing the main events and field trips that were realized after talk about the lessons learned and in the end brings some case studies and sucess stories.

This paper is a contribution to the celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the Buenos Aires Plan of Action for Promoting and Implementing Technical Cooperation among Developing Countries (TCDC) (UN, 1978), which gave birth to what is known today, in the UN system and beyond, as “South-South and Triangular Cooperation" (SSTC).

The objective of TAF’s projects was either to strengthen companies’ core operations by delivering consulting expertise to enable them to grow, and hence contribute to food security through increased production and food availability, or to facilitate the implementation of new business models that extend their reach to poor consumers, producers or employees through ‘inclusive business’ initiatives