The privatization of agricultural advisory and extension services in many countries and the associated pluralism of service providers has renewed interest in farmers’ use of fee-for-service advisors. Understanding farmers’ use of advisory services is important, given the role such services are expected to play in helping farmers address critical environmental and sustainability challenges. This paper aims to identify factors associated with farmers’ use of fee-for service advisors and bring fresh conceptualization to this topic.
Este documento recoge los principales avances y logros de innovación de los más de ochocientos agricultores y agricultoras, “Héroes de la Alimentación”, y representantes institucionales, que participaron desde el año 2018 en el proyecto “Desarrollo de Capacidades para Sistemas de Innovación Agrícola en El Salvador” (CDAIS, por sus siglas en inglés).
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has developed a web-based Rift Valley fever (RVF) Early Warning Decision Support Tool (RVF DST), which integrates near real-time RVF risk maps with geospatial data, historical and current RVF disease events from EMPRES Global Animal Disease Information System (EMPRES-i) and expert knowledge on RVF eco-epidemiology.
Conventional approaches to agricultural extension based on top–down technology transfer and information dissemination models are inadequate to help smallholder farmers tackle increasingly complex agroclimatic adversities. Innovative service delivery alternatives, such as field schools, exist but are mostly implemented in isolationistic silos with little effort to integrate them for cost reduction and greater technical effectiveness.
The concept of an innovation system is used to understand how innovation contributes to economic growth. However, innovation systems do not evolve evenly in different parts of the world. This paper contributes to the ongoing debate on the emergence of innovation systems in the context of developing countries. It uses the Rwandan case, where agriculture is a dominant socio-economic sector with high innovation potential. It explores how stakeholder interactions and policies contribute to the emergence of an agriculture innovation system in Rwanda.
FAO Eritrea, in partnership with the Ministry of Agriculture is implementing the national component of a global project entitled “Developing capacity in Agriculture Innovation System project: Scaling up the Tropical Agriculture Platform Framework”.
Where CGIAR breeding programs rely on the private sector for the multiplication and distribution of improved cultivars, persistent challenges have dampened their impact on varietal adoption and turnover rates. Part of the problem is that research and practice in CGIAR and among its national breeding program partners tend to treat the private sector as a vehicle for seed delivery, rather than as commercial businesses facing a range of unique constraints and threats.
A fragmented digital agriculture ecosystem has been linked to the slow scale-out of digital platforms and other digital technology solutions for agriculture. This has undermined the prospects of digitalizing agriculture and increasing sectoral outcomes in sub-Saharan African countries. We conceptualized an aggregator platform for digital services in agriculture as a special form of digital platforms that can enhance the value and usage of digital technologies at the industry level. Little is known about how such a platform can create value as a new service ecology in agriculture.
The recent proliferation of mobile phones in rural Africa has also led to increased interest in mobile financial services (MFS), such as mobile money and mobile banking. Such services are often portrayed as promising tools to improve agricultural finance, especially among smallholders who are typically underserved by traditional banks. However, empirical evidence on the actual use of MFS for agricultural activities is thin. Here, we use nationally representative data from Kenya to analyze the use of mobile payments, mobile savings, and mobile credit among the farming population.
The 2021 Global Report on Food Crises (GRFC 2021) highlights the remarkably high severity and numbers of people in Crisis or worse (IPC/CH Phase 3 or above) or equivalent in 55 countries/territories, driven by persistent conflict, pre-existing and COVID-19-related economic shocks, and weather extremes. The number identified in the 2021 edition is the highest in the report’s five-year existence. The report is produced by the Global Network against Food Crises (which includes WFP), an international alliance working to address the root causes of extreme hunger.