This booklet describes some recent, stand-out innovations and achievements that are the fruits of this future-oriented partnership, fully supported by the Katalyst project. As Katalyst is in its third phase of operations,  some of the milestone achievements of the project are reviewed. The project expects to expand on these successful models to be implemented throughout Bangladesh. 

The Synthesis Document provides a synthesis of concepts and principles of the Common Framework developed under the Tropical Agriculture Platform (TAP). The objective of the TAP Common Framework is to promote better coherence and greater impact of capacity development in support of agricultural innovation in the Tropics. Developed in 2015 through a highly participatory process, it was agreed that the Framework should provide conceptual underpinnings and practical guidance.

This new Africa Region Sustainable Development Series aims to focus international attention on a range of topics, spur debate, and use robust, evidence-based, informed approaches to advance policy dialogue and policy-making. This new Series synthesizes a large body of work from disparate sources, and uses simple language to convey the findings in an easily-digestible format. Ultimately, we want to seed solutions that can help accelerate the fight to end poverty in Africa.

Linking farmers to markets is widely viewed as a milestone towards promoting economic growth and poverty reduction. However, market and institutional imperfections along the supply chain thwart perfect vertical and spatial price transmission and prevent farmers and market actors from getting access to information, identifying business opportunities and allocating their resources efficiently. This acts as a barrier to market-led rural development and poverty reduction.

Disasters are increasing worldwide, with more devastating effects than ever before. While the absolute number of disasters around the world has almost doubled since the 1980s, the average number of natural disasters in Middle East and North Africa (MNA) has almost tripled over the same period of time. In the MNA, the interplay of natural disasters, rapid urbanization, water scarcity, and climate change has emerged as a serious challenge for policy and planning.

The Nile Story is one of immense challenges and remarkable achievements for the economic development of the region. It begins in 1999, when the ministers in charge of water affairs in the Nile countries agreed to form the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI). Between 2003 and 2015, the Nile Basin Trust Fund (NBTF) supported and coordinated cooperative work in the region, which has been delivered mainly through the NBI.

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.

Livelihoods, food security, and development processes in Sub-Saharan Africa are highly dependent on land management practices to generate natural ecosystem goods and services. Out of a total population of about 717 million people, almost 60 percent depend for their livelihood on agriculture, hunting, fishing, or forestry. However, unsustainable land management already is leading to large-scale land degradation trends, which pose a threat to food security and poverty alleviation in Sub-Saharan Africa. Climate change threatens to exacerbate and add to the existing vulnerabilities.

This report addresses the establishment of a centralized information and communication technology (ICT) platform for the microfinance sector in Nepal. It has been shown from international experience that ICT improves the efficiency, transparency, and outreach of microfinance institutions (MFIs) and reduces operational costs. There is an opportunity in Nepal to implement similar solutions, and this report provides information on these solutions and offers recommendations for implementing them in Nepal.