Smallholders have begun to take advantage of a growing pool of investment in climate change mitigation. Meanwhile, early movers in this area are working to develop innovative models that will allow projects to be financially sustainable and scalable while benefiting local actors. This study focuses on two of these projects in East Africa, managed by Vi Agroforestry in Kenya and ECOTRUST in Uganda. They engaged in a participatory action research process to identify ways that local actors could take on expanded roles within the projects

This study addresses this particular research gap by adopting a multi-scale approach to understand how climatic and non-climatic stressors vary, and interact, across three spatial scales (household, community and district levels) to influence livelihood vulnerability of smallholder farming households in the Savannah zone of northern Ghana. This study across three case study villages utilises a series of participatory tools including semi-structured interviews, key informant interviews and focus group discussions.

This paper was synthesized from several scholarly literature and aimed at providing up-to-date information on climate change impacts, adaptation strategies, policies and institutional mechanisms that each agriculture subsector had put in place in dealing with climate change and its related issues in West Africa. For each subsector (crop, fishery and livestock), the current status, climate change impacts, mitigation and adaption strategies have been analyzed

There is a considerable shortage of improved seed in Ethiopia. Despite good reasons to invest in this market, private sector investments are not occurring. Using an institutional economics theoretical framework, this chapter analyzes the formal Ethiopian seed system and identifies transaction costs to find potential starting points for institutional innovations.

The generation of innovations has traditionally been attributed to research organizations and the farmer’s own potential for the development of innovative solutions has largely been neglected. In this chapter, we explore the innovativeness of farmers in Upper East Ghana. To this end, we employ farmer innovation contests for the identification of local innovations. Awards such as motorcycles function as an incentive for farmers to share innovations and develop new practices.

Citizen science is the involvement of citizens, such as farmers, in the research process. Citizen science has become increasingly popular recently, supported by the proliferation of mobile communication technologies such as smartphones. However, citizen science methodologies have not yet been widely adopted in agricultural research. Here, was conducted an online survey with 57 British and French farmers in 2014.

Brazil’s influence in agricultural development in Africa has become noticeable in recent years. South–South cooperation is one of the instruments for engagement, and affinities between Brazil and African countries are invoked to justify the transfer of technology and public policies. In this article, examines the case of one of Brazil’s development cooperation programs, More Food International (MFI), to illustrate why policy concepts and ideas that emerge in particular settings, such as family farming in Brazil, do not travel easily across space and socio-political realities.

This study identifies systemic problems in the New Zealand Agricultural Innovation System (AIS) in relation to the AIS capacity to enact a co-innovation approach, in which all relevant actors in the agricultural sector contribute to combined technological, social and institutional change. Systemic problems are factors that negatively influence the direction and speed of co-innovation and impede the development and functioning of innovation systems. The contribution in the paper is twofold.

Given the increasing tension between food production and food demand in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as the poor development of the rice sector in Africa, the present paper examines the impact of agricultural extension on adoption of chemical fertilizers and their impact on rice productivity in Ghana. A parametric approach was employed to account for selectivity and endogeneity effects, which most impact studies fail to address. The empirical results reveal that agricultural extension service is endogenous in the chemical fertilizer adoption specification

The purpose of this publication (part of the FAO series on sustainable food value chain development) is to facilitate the systematic integration of gender equality dimensions into value chain development programmes and projects. It raises awareness on gender inequalities and discusses the importance of addressing these dimensions in value chain development, while also building a common approach for work on gender-sensitive value chain development.