The Farmer Field School (FFS) approach has been very successful and witnessed a strong expansion in many areas beyond crop production. Notwithstanding this success, the adoption of FFS in national extension often remains problematic and FFS activities have often been implemented in the margin of national institutions with strong reliance on donor funding. The creation of an enabling environment for institutional support is essential for expanding the effort, improving quality, and strengthening impact and continuity of the FFSs.
The paper uses a stochastic frontier analysis of production functions to estimate the level of technical efficiency in agriculture for a panel of 29 developing countries in Africa and Asia between 1994 and 2000. In addition, the paper examines how different components of an agricultural innovation system interact to determine the estimated technical inefficiencies.The paper has been presented at the Southern Agricultural Economics Association Annual Meeting, Birmingham, AL, February 4-7, 2012.
This report explores the role of rural networks in enhancing innovation processes, questioning the features of the agricultural/rural networks could enhance farmers’ ability to co-innovate in cooperation with other actors. The prospect of this investigation is also to provide interesting and significant experiences that constitute examples for the ‘European Innovation Partnership’ by increasing farmers’ capacities to create, test, implement and evaluate innovations in cooperation with other rural actors.
The report synthesises the research conducted under the PRO AKIS project for the topic "Designing, implementing and maintaining agricultural/rural networks to enhance farmers’ ability to innovate in cooperation with other rural actors".
In an effort to raise incomes and increase resilience of smallholder farmers and their families in Feed the Future1 (FTF) countries, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) funded the Developing Local Extension Capacity (DLEC) project. This project is led by Digital Green in partnership with the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), CARE International (CARE) and multiple resource partners.
Working with women in the agriculture sector in Pakistan poses a challenge as agricultural extension and development staff are predominantly male and interactions for women with men outside the family are culturally not acceptable. At the same time, women in Pakistan play an equal role in agriculture as well as taking responsibility for household chores, including cooking and taking care of the nutrition of the family.
El presente documento se elabora de conformidad a lo requerido en los términos de referencia de la Consultoría “Situación de la institucionalidad de apoyo a la innovación comercial de la agricultura familiar y de los procesos de gestión comercial de la agricultura familiar en Chile”, la cual hace parte del Proyecto IICA/FONCT “Innovaciones institucionales para el apoyo a la gestión de procesos comerciales de la agricultura familiar (AF) y su vinculación con los mercados”.
During the last two decades there is a growing awareness of the importance of introducing organic agricultural production in Serbia due to issues of health, environmental protection and need for more sustainable agriculture. There is a need for education of small farmers on the possibilities of organic production and significance of information technologies for education, production and marketing. This paper aims to examine the perception on the possibilities of organic production and ICT use concerning their level of education.
This paper was prepared to present at the Farmer First Revisited: 20 Years On conference at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK, December, 2007. Its focus is the challenge of strengthening agricultural innovation systems. The paper prefaces this discussion by reflecting on an apparent paradox. While agricultural innovation has never been better studied and understood, many of our ideas about innovation have failed to fundamentally change the institutional and policy setting of public and private investment intended to promote innovation for development.
There is increasing policy, practice and academic interest in “inclusive innovation”. In simple terms, this is the means by which new goods and services are developed for and/or by those who have been excluded from the development mainstream; particularly the billions living on lowest incomes. However, there are many competing perspectives on inclusive innovation, which this paper resolves into an integrated ‘ladder’ model of different levels of inclusive innovation.