Traditional approaches to innovation systems policymaking and governance often focus exclusively on the central provision of services, regulations, fiscal measures, and subsidies.
This brief is part of the series, A Field Guide for Disaster Risk Reduction in Southern Africa: Key Practices for DRR Implementers, coordinated by the FAO Subregional Office for Disaster Risk Reduction/Management for Southern Africa. The brief provides practical guidelines on storage practices and methodologies to assist southern African farmers prone to natural hazards, mainly cyclones, droughts and floods.
Owing to its devices that are the ember furnace, the fat collection tray, the indirect smoke generator system and the hot air distributor, the FAO-Thiaroye processing technique (FTT-Thiaroye), focus of this methodological guide, strengthens the functions of existing improved smoking techniques in small-scale fisheries.
This paper discusses a range of approaches and benchmarks that can guide future design of value chain impact evaluations. Twenty studies were reviewed to understand the status and direction of value chain impact evaluations. A majority of the studies focus on evaluating the impact of only a few interventions, at several levels within the value chains. Few impact evaluations are based on well-constructed, well-conceived comparison groups. Most of them rely on use of propensity score matching to construct counterfactual groups and estimate treatment effects.
This paper discusses a methodology to model precipitation indices and premium prices for index-based drought insurance for smallholders. Spatial basis risk, which is borne by the insured, is a problem, especially in variable topography. Also, site-specific drought risk needs to be estimated accurately in order to offer effective insurance cover and ensure financial sustainability of the insurance scheme. We explore farmers' perceptions on drought and spatial climate variability and draw conclusions concerning basis risk with regards to the proposed methodology.
In this paper the authors present the development of an analytical framework to study agricultural innovation systems. They divide the agricultural sector into four levels and expand the innovation system approach to study innovation processes.
The purpose of this paper is to analyze the use of food insecurity as coercive tool or a weapon during conflict, providing a case study on Gaza. The authors aim at proving that Food insecurity in Gaza is not merely a product of conflict, but rather a systematic policy of control. The paper includes the presentation of community-based innovations that were created in the extremely intricate case of Gaza, in order to retain certain economic and political agency over food and farming systems.
This paper investigates Innovation Systems Concepts and Principles starting with an historical perspective. Then it analyzes their application to Integrated Agricultural Research for Development (IAR4D) and makes a comparison between the traditional Research and Development Systems Approaches and the Innovation Systems Approach.
A growing variety of public and private agricultural advisory services are available today, leading to increasingly ‘pluralistic service systems’ (PSS) where advisory services are provided by different actors and funded from different sources. This is generally regarded as an important step forward, as it steers away from relying on purely state-led or privatised service systems. PSS hold the potential to overcome constraints related to funding, staffing and expertise, and to make advisory services more demand-driven.
Whereas Irish potato (Solanum tuberosum) is a major staple food in many countries, it is one of the priority value chain crops under the Rwanda’s Crop Intensification Program (CIP). The crop is more important in the northern and northwestern than other parts of Rwanda. After plantain and cassava, potato is the third most important staple cultivated by 52.9% of the households in Rwanda.