Society’s learning capacity in the field of sustainable land resource management is at stake and more emphasis on knowledge management is needed to guarantee that the accumulated knowledge is shared in such a way that the right actors have appropriate knowledge at the right time to take the best decisions. Efficient policies governing structures for national and regional knowledge management need to be formulated and the working procedures of the various actors in the field need to be defined more sharply.

In-depth analysis of the role and capacity development needs of farmers organization in innovation processes, using the evidence from a number of case studies from contemporary SSA agriculture. Experiences indicate that Farmers’organizations (FOs) can play an important role in sharing knowledge-for-innovation by initiating multi-actor platforms for interactive learning and by implementing joint activity programmes (including use of the media) with extension services on a cost-sharing basis.

In line with the government of Mozambique’s strategies, this document proposes an innovative model with high promise to develop value-adding market led post-harvest processing enterprises and to transform the post harvest-processing sector in Mozambique, while creating sustainable jobs and increasing incomes. The challenge is to ensure coordination across value chains to guarantee that the right conditions are in place for making the Agribusiness Innovation Center (AIC) a success.

TAP and its partners carried out regional surveys in Asia, Africa and Central America to assess priorities, capacities and needs in national agricultural innovation systems. This document provides a Regional synthesis report on capacity needs assessment for agricultural innovation in Africa.  FARA was selected as Recipient Organization by FAO to facilitate TAP implementation in Africa. This is mainly due to its position as the umbrella organization bringing together and forming coalitions of major regional stakeholders in agricultural research and development.  

Agriculture is central to Ethiopian economy but its sustainable development faces enormous challenges. Low innovation capacity, low productivity, dwindling natural resources and climate change, small-scale subsistence farming, and low levels of market integration and value addition have all made agricultural development more complex. In spite of the decades of research and development efforts, the rate of growth for both crop and livestock productivity has remained low.

This paper uses household and key informant survey data from Ethiopia to: (1) understand the organizational structures that influence change in dairy production systems; (2) explore how local-level innovation system networks are functioning in the smallholder dairy production and (3) identify intervention points for strengthening innovation capacity. Results revealed that public sector actors are the major role players in the dairy production system despite their minor role in marketing linkages. We also found out that the private sector actors play peripheral roles in the network.

These Proceedings report on the second International Conference of the Convergence of Sciences (CoS) programme in Elmina (2009). The first International Conference was four years earlier in the same location, where it was discussed how to follow up on the findings of the first CoS Programme phase (entitled CoS1 running from 2001 to 2006). The Conference was intended to introduce the focus on “innovation systems”, and how to enhance these systems for smallholder farmers’ development.

The agricultural innovation systems approach emphasizes the collective nature of innovation and stresses that innovation is a co-evolutionary process, resulting from alignment of technical, social, institutional and organizational dimensions. These insights are increasingly informing interventions that focus on setting up multi-stakeholder initiatives, such as innovation platforms and networks, as mechanisms for enhancing agricultural innovation, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.

This paper draws lessons from selected country experiences of adaptation and innovation in pursuit of food security goals.