Over the years, CTA has contributed to building ACP capacity to understand innovation processes, strengthen the agricultural innovation system and embed innovation thinking in agricultural and rural development strategies. The CTA Top 20 Innovations project set out to prove that innovation is taking place in ACP agriculture and in the process has demonstrated that smallholder farmers are beneficiaries as well as partners in agricultural innovation.
The agricultural industry is getting more data-centric and requires precise, more advanced data and technologies than before, despite being familiar with agricultural processes. The agriculture industry is being advanced by various information and advanced communication technologies, such as the Internet of Things (IoT). The rapid emergence of these advanced technologies has restructured almost all other industries, as well as advanced agriculture, which has shifted the industry from a statistical approach to a quantitative one.
While education access has improved globally, gains are uneven, and development impacts driven by increases in education continue to be left on the table, especially in rural areas. Demand-driven extension and advisory services (EAS) – as a key institution educating rural people while providing agricultural advice and supplying inputs – have a critical role to play in bridging the education gap. This can help ensure that millions of young people successfully capitalise on opportunities in agriculture markets, as surveys in Rwanda and Uganda demonstrate.
The Unites States Agency for International Development (USAID) Feed the Future De-veloping Local Extension Capacity (DLEC) project conducted a three-country study on youth and EAS in Rwanda, Niger and Gua-temala. These case studies provided a land-scape analysis to inform actions to strengthen the inclusion of youth in EAS to improve their livelihoods and increase the effective-ness of EAS systems.
Este artículo analiza algunos conceptos sobre el desarrollo de cadenas de valor como un tipo de intervención que promueve el crecimiento agrícola y apunta a mejorar los ingresos de los productores mediante el fortalecimiento de los vínculos entre las empresas y los pequeños productores.
The objective of this study is to evaluate the ability of soil physical characteristics (i.e., texture and moisture conditions) to better understand the breeding conditions of desert locust (DL). Though soil moisture and texture are well-known and necessary environmental conditions for DL breeding, in this study, we highlight the ability of model-derived soil moisture estimates to contribute towards broader desert locust monitoring activities.
The challenge of food security in Nigeria hinges on several factors of which poor technical efficiency is key. Using a stochastic frontier framework, we estimated the technical efficiency of agricultural households in Nigeria and tested for the significance of mean technical efficiency of food-secure and food-insecure agricultural households. We further assessed the determinants of agricultural households’ inefficiencies within the stochastic frontier model and adopted a standard probit model to assess the determinants of households’ food security status.
One of the most important things that innovation platforms do is to build the capacity of their members to innovate. Some key elements of innovation capacity include: self-organization, learning new skills, changing mindsets, valuing others’ roles in innovation, having a holistic view, being able to adapt to changing situations, creating new ideas, recognizing opportunities, being proactive, using indigenous ideas, and looking to the future. This brief uses the analogy of a traditional African cooking pot to explain how innovation capacity is developed within an innovation platform.
2015 a été une année marquante pour l’avenir de la planète et donc pour l’avenir de chaque femme, chaque homme, chaque enfant, fille ou garçon, aux quatre coins du monde. Deux événements importants – le Sommet des Nations Unies sur le développement durable 2015 et la COP21, sur le développement et le changement climatique, ont donné lieu à des engagements concrets et sans précédent à l’échelle mondiale pour éradiquer la pauvreté d’ici à 2030 et promouvoir la protection de l’environnement.
This book describes how the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) has been trying to improve markets for staple foods in Africa through its Market Access Programme. It describes 13 projects from eight countries (Burkina Faso, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda) that the programme has supported. The book does not attempt to describe the cases in detail. Rather, it focuses on particular aspects in order to derive lessons from which the project managers, AGRA and other development organizations can learn.