Global agriculture will face multiple challenges over the coming decades. It must produce more food to feed an increasingly affluent and growing world population that will demand a more diverse diet, contribute to overall development and poverty alleviation in many developing countries, confront increased competition for alternative uses of finite land and water resources, adapt to climate change, and contribute to preserving biodiversity and restoring fragile ecosystems.
The objective of this report is to identify and evaluate best practices in smallholder private irrigation in West Africa. The report is based on a comparative assessment of the smallholder private irrigation subsector in Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, and Nigeria, which included a literature review, field visits, and workshops at both national and regional levels. The task lists for the assessment is provided in annex one. This report first presents the main features of smallholder irrigation and the development projects that have promoted its use in West Africa in chapter two.
This report highlights the great potential of the agribusiness sector in Africa by drawing on experience in Africa as well as other regions. The evidence demonstrates that good policies, a conducive business environment, and strategic support from governments can help agribusiness reach its potential. Africa is now at a crossroads, from which it can take concrete steps to realize its potential or continue to lose competitiveness, missing a major opportunity for increased growth, employment, and food security. The report pursues several lines of analysis.
The Development Marketplace 2009 focused on adaptation to climate change. This paper identifies lessons from the Marketplace and assesses their implications for adaptation support. The findings are based on: statistical tabulation of all proposals; in-depth qualitative and quantitative analysis of the 346 semi-finalists; and interviews with finalists and assessors. Proposals were fuelled by deep concerns that ongoing climate change and its impacts undermine development and exacerbate poverty, migration and food insecurity.
Over the past 25 years, Uganda has experienced sustained economic growth, supported by a prudent macroeconomic framework and propelled by consistent policy reforms. Annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth averaged 7.4 percent in the 2000s, compared with 6.5 in the 1990s. Economic growth has enabled substantial poverty reduction, with the proportion of people living in poverty more than halving from 56 percent in the 1992 to 23.3 percent in 2009. However, welfare improvements have not been shared equally; there is increasing urban rural inequality and inequality between regions.
The objective of this report is to assess the usefulness of providing guidance for scaling up good practices in core ARD business lines, and to test the prospects for doing so. The output of the document is a guide for a systematic discussion on scaling up of Competitive Grant Schemes (CGSs) for agricultural research and extension at key decision points during the life of an ARD project. This report addresses the other end of the state-of-practice spectrum - good practices and beyond.
Increasingly, value chain approaches are integrated with multi-stakeholder processes to facilitate inclusive innovation and value chain upgrading of smallholders. This pathway to smallholder integration into agri-food markets has received limited analysis. This article analyses this integration through a case study of an ongoing smallholder dairy development programme in Tanzania.
Capacity development interventions in support of agricultural innovation are more effective when based on systematic and participatory assessments of existing skills and capacity needs. Recognizing that, an instrument has been developed in the context of the Capacity Development for Agricultural Innovation Systems (CDAIS) project. It consists of a capacity scoring tool that allows assessing innovation capacities, identifying strengths and weaknesses and monitoring capacity changes over time. This paper describes the scoring tool and provides guidelines on how to apply it successfully.
Increasingly, multi-stakeholder processes have been recognized as being necessary to the development of public policies seeking to promote systemic innovation in response to complex and multidimensional challenges, such as household food security, rural development, and environmental change. Saint Lucia, a small island developing state located in the Caribbean, has been grappling with a wide range of agriculture, food and nutrition security challenges with varying degrees of policy success.
This study has been produced with the overall goal to document and analyse exisiting best practices in the field of RWHI management in sub-Saharan Africa, with a special focus on Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. This is meant to determine the suitability of RWHI management under multivariate biophysical and socioeconomic conditions. The best practices include specific information and know-how on the performance, cost-efficiency and impacts of RWHI technologies.