CABI’s Plantwise programme runs local plant clinics in 24 countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America where trained ‘plant doctors’ provide on-the-spot diagnosis and advice for farmers who bring samples to the clinics. A database that records each consultation and shares knowledge across clinics and countries continually builds the ability of the programme to respond to farmers’ needs. The programme embodies key principles of an innovation systems approach.

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.  

The new challenges facing the European agricultural and rural sectors call for a review of the links between knowledge production and its use to foster innovation, and for a deeper analysis of the potential of the current Agricultural Knowledge and Innovation Systems (AKIS) to react to the evolving context. This paper highlights how the Italian AKIS places itself in the new emerging framework, with a particular emphasis on the incentives guiding the system and the experiences of monitoring and evaluating the national AKIS policy.

The innovation system perspective acknowledges the contributions made by all stakeholders involved in knowledge development, dissemination and appropriation. According to the specific agricultural production system, farmers adopt innovations, modify them or innovate on their own. This paper examines the role of farmers' experiments and innovations in Cuba's agricultural innovation system (AIS), identifies knowledge exchange encounters and describes some strategies implemented to institutionalize farmers' experiments and innovations.

In this paper,  presented at the 12th European IFSA Symposium (Workshop: "Generating spaces for innovation in agricultural and rural development") in 2016, the authors assess the integration of new entrants to small-scale farming into agricultural knowledge and innovation systems (AKIS), in four study sites located on Europe’s periphery (Bulgaria, Poland, Portugal, and the United Kingdom).

While privatization of extension has received considerable attention with respect to implications for public and private good, less consideration has been given to structural and relational implications for knowledge sharing.

More than 25 years after the first implementation of Farmer Field Schools (FFS), there is a rich corpus of evidence that participation in FFS improves farmers’ knowledge, skills, and competencies. On the other hand, several studies converge to show that FFS, by strengthening group action, have the potential to build-up social capital among participants and, thereafter, within local communities.

The Establishment of the Rahad Scheme in Eastern Sudan in the 1970s established an agricultural innovation system where formal actors such as extension, research, finance institutions and informal actors such as agro pastoral organizations are networking to provide better livelihoods within the irrigated scheme area. This investigation focuses on the roles and interactions of agro pastoral organizations and finance institutions in relation to extension work in Rahad Scheme.

This paper was prepared to present at the Farmer First Revisited: 20 Years On conference at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK, December, 2007. Its focus is the challenge of strengthening agricultural innovation systems. The paper prefaces this discussion by reflecting on an apparent paradox. While agricultural innovation has never been better studied and understood, many of our ideas about innovation have failed to fundamentally change the institutional and policy setting of public and private investment intended to promote innovation for development.

The privatization of agricultural research and extension establishments worldwide has led to the development of a market for services designed to support agricultural innovation. However, due to market and systemic failures, both supply side and demand side parties in this market have experienced constraints in effecting transactions and establishing the necessary relationships to engage in demand-driven innovation processes.