The Feed the Future Asia Innovative Farmers Activity (AIFA) is a regional project working to facilitate the scaling of critical agricultural technologies through regional partnership and technology transfer. The project works with a range of agricultural technology stakeholders on a regional basis (private sector, research institutions, governments, networks, etc.) to increase food security, reduce poverty, and improve environmental sustainability by facilitating agricultural innovation and technology diffusion in the Asia region.

Georeferenced data are a key factor in many decision-making systems. However, their interpretation is user and context dependent so that, for each situation, data analysts have to interpret them, a time-consuming task. One approach to alleviate this task, is the use of semantic annotations to store the produced information. Annotating data is however hard to perform and prone to errors, especially when executed manually. This difficulty increases with the amount of data to annotate.

Over the past decades, Brazilian agriculture has played an important role in the international market, in response to growing global demand for products, services and food security. This achievement was in a large extent powered by the ability to generate knowledge and the actions promoted by science and technology institutes.

The presentation was delivered to a conference entitled "Science Protecting Plant Health" in Brisbane on September 26th 2017 and then in private policy briefings to ACIAR (Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research) and DAWR (Australian Government Department of Agriculture) in Australia. The presentation includes description of the role of the Tropical Agriculture Platform (TAP) and case study examples from CABI’s work to describe capacity building at the levels of individual, organisation and enabling environment.

There is plenty of information available in the public domain that covers various aspects of extension and know-how about new methodologies for implementation. However this information is often scattered and presented in complex academic language. Hence practitioners, who often have very limited time and/or may only have basic formal education, find it difficult to make use of this information. The Global Good Practices Initiative aims to bridge this gap by providing information about extension approaches and methods in easy-to-understand formats.

This review is an information resource for development practitioners, development agencies and funders of development activities who have an interest in assessing capacity for agricultural innovation in developing countries, including the developing regions of sub-Saharan Africa. In the context that further investment in the agricultural capacity of developing countries is recognised as a development priority, the review explores what is known about the “tools” (i.e. concepts and methods) which are available to guide assessment of innovation capacity in these countries.