This report provides a synthesis of all findings and information generated through a “stocktaking” process that involved a desk study of Prolinnova documents and evaluation reports, a questionnaire to 40 staff members of international organizations in agricultural research and development (ARD), self-assessment by the Country Platforms (CPs) and backstopping visits to five CPs. In 2014, the Prolinnova network saw a need to re-strategise in a changing context, and started this process by reviewing the activities it had undertaken and assessing its own functioning.
This review studied a selection of projects from the Research Into Use (RIU) Africa portfolio: the Nyagatare maize platform in Rwanda; the cowpea platform in Kano state, Nigeria; the pork platform in Malawi, the Farm Input Promotions (FIPS) Best Bet in Kenya, and the Armyworm Best Bet in Kenya and Tanzania. For each of the selected projects, assessments were made on how it changed the capacity to innovate, the household level poverty impact, whether the intervention off ered value for money, and what were the main lessons learned.
This paper examines the role of postsecondary agricultural education and training (AET) in sub-Saharan Africa in the context of the region’s agricultural innovation systems. Specifically, the paper looks at how AET in sub-Saharan Africa can contribute to agricultural development by strengthening innovative capacity, or the ability of individuals and organisations to introduce new products and processes that are socially or economically relevant, particularly with respect to smallholder farmers who represent the largest group of agricultural producers in the region.
This paper proposes the adoption of small-scale friendly postharvest techniques in the form of small-scale postharvest practices (SSPPs). To justify this proposal, the impact of SSPPs adoption on self-reported losses were investigated in Rivers State Nigeria. The factors influencing plantain farmers and traders intention to use SSPPs were also studied. Multistage and snowball sampling techniques were used to obtain data from farmers and traders, respectively
Society’s learning capacity in the field of sustainable land resource management is at stake and more emphasis on knowledge management is needed to guarantee that the accumulated knowledge is shared in such a way that the right actors have appropriate knowledge at the right time to take the best decisions. Efficient policies governing structures for national and regional knowledge management need to be formulated and the working procedures of the various actors in the field need to be defined more sharply.
The publication reviews forty years of development experience and concludes that donors and partner countries alike have tended to look at capacity development as mainly a technical process, or as a transfer of knowledge or institutions from North to South.
In this paper, was analyzed farmers' preferences for high-input maize production supported by site-specific nutrient management recommendations provided by an ICT-based extension tool that is being developed for extension services in the maize belt of Nigeria. Was used a choice experiment to provide ex-ante insights on the adoption potentials of site-specific extension services from the perspective of farmers. We control for attribute non-attendance and account for class as well as scale heterogeneity in preferences using different models, and find robust results.
This study focused on the relationship between job design and behavioural outcomes of employees in Agricultural Research Training, Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria. The study was quantitative and the items in the questionnaire were adapted from previous studies. A total of 227 respondents were surveyed and statistical regression models were used to examine the relationship between the independent variables (job design) and dependent variables (employee behavioural outcomes).
Literature is scanty on how public agricultural investments can help reducing the impact of future challenges such as climate change and population pressure on national economies. The objective of this study is to assess the medium and long-term effects of alternative agricultural research and development investment scenarios on male and female employment in 14 African countries. The authors first estimate the effects of agricultural investment scenarios on the overall GDP growth of a given country using partial and general equilibrium models.
The sustainable development of Nigeria is being challenged by a persistent large financial inclusion gender gap (FIGG). The same gender gap in the country’s smallholder agriculture frustrates the multifunctional potentials of agriculture in achieving sustainable development outcomes. The smallholders drive the agricultural sector, comprise majority of the worlds’ poor and are found in all regions in Nigeria.