A Community Innovation Fund (CIF) is a simple kick-start fund to support farmer interest groups who have limited access to formal financial services for implementing climate-smart agriculture (CSA) practices. A CIF can be implemented as sole fund or as co-investment to community savings and loans groups. In this publication, a step-by-step guide for facilitating a CIF in a community, based on experiences from My Loi Climate-Smart Village (CSV), was provided. My Loi is one of three CCAFS CSVs in Vietnam, where participatory CSA practices are being tested and adopted.
This article analyses spatial innovation dispersion and also level of innovation development across the crop sector. For this, five crude indicators viz. Mechanisation indicator, Vulnerability indicator, Concentration indicator, Stability indicator and Adoption indicator were constructed which determined the direction of innovation. Agricultural Innovation System encompasses both the facets of technology development and technology dissemination. However, much concentration and efforts were exerted on innovation and technology development part while the other part i.e.
The Chinese Government has initiated a series of agricultural reforms since the 1970s to encourage agents to provide more services to farmers. In 2006, a new round of agricultural reforms was extended nationwide; however, the effectiveness of these reforms has not been examined. Based on a comparison of survey data sets before and after the reforms, we found that overall they significantly increased the time agents spend on agricultural extension services, although their effectiveness differs among three major components of the reforms.
This book summarizes the achievements as well as some of the challenges faced while implementing integrated systems research to support the sustainable development of smallholder farming in the uplands of the Mekong region.
The paper describes the existing mechanisms of innovation diffusion particularly focusing on the initial phase to introduce the results of innovative projects into the government system of Uzbekistan. The paper aims to analyze the existing bureaucratic, legal and political matrix for the introduction of ZEF project innovations into practice. The innovations developed by the staff of the ZEF/UNESCO project in Uzbekistan range from their content and purpose of use from technological to institutional ones. The innovations considered in this paper are mainly technological ones.
This paper presents a case study of the Honey Bee Network’s decentralized model for collecting, verifying and disseminating grassroots innovations and provides a roadmap for its replication in Africa. The Honey Bee Network brings together governmental and non‐governmental institutions, members of academia, scholars and a large number of volunteers.
Innovations are fast changing the agricultural landscape driven by the increasing need to shift towards sustainable practices without sacrificing the productivity and profitability of farming. Innovations in technology, institutions, processes, and products have contributed to the growth of agriculture, globally and in developing countries including India and Africa, as observed in the cases of green revolution in cereals; and gene revolution in cotton.
Technological innovations have driven economic development and improvement in living conditions throughout history. However, the majority of smallholder farmers in sub‐Saharan Africa have seldom adopted or used science‐based technological innovations. Consequently, several scholars have been persistently questioning the effectiveness of intervention models in smallholder agriculture.
The main goal of the study is to quantify the effects of a) change in nitrogen fertilization rate, b) adjustment of sowing date, c) implementation of new cultivars, and d) supplementary irrigation on maize cropping systems across six African countries including Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Malawi, Ethiopia and Burkina Faso. For this purpose, 30 years (1980-2010) of climate data are used as well as soil and management information obtained from global datasets at 0.5° x 0.5° spatial resolution.
This working paper provides the following text as a abstract: