This paper comparatively analyzes the structure of agricultural policy development networks that connect organizations working on agricultural development, climate change and food security in fourteen smallholder farming communities across East Africa, West Africa and South Asia.
This publication provides a collection of papers, commentaries, expert opinions and reflections on state-of-the-art innovation systems thinking and approaches in agriculture. It is the direct output of a CTA and WUR/CoS-SIS collaboration which had its genesis in an expert consultation on ‘Innovation Systems: Towards Effective Strategies in support of Smallholder Farmers’.
This report provides summary findings and conclusions from a set of five case studies examining the scaling up of pro-poor agricultural innovations through commercial pathways in developing countries.
The Bureau for Food Security (BFS) of USAID commissioned five country studies examining the scaling up of agricultural innovations through commercial pathways in developing countries, to understand how the Agency – including its country missions and implementing partners (IPs) – can use donor projects to achieve greater scale and long-term commercial sustainability.
The Scaling Agricultural Innovations Workshop gathered scaling experts from a range of organizations and agriculture sectors to share their experiences and ideas on the findings and lessons learned from five case studies (hybrid maize in Zambia, irrigated rice in Senegal, Purdue Improved Crop Storage bags in Kenya, agricultural machinery services in Bangladesh, and Kuroiler chickens in Uganda).
Many countries are facing growing levels of food insecurity, reversing years of development gains, and threatening the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. Even before COVID-19 reduced incomes and disrupted supply chains, chronic and acute hunger were on the rise due to various factors, including conflict, socio-economic conditions, natural hazards, climate change and pests.
African agriculture is currently at a crossroads, at which persistent food shortages are compounded by threats from climate change. But, as this book argues, Africa can feed itself in a generation and help contribute to global food security. To achieve this Africa has to define agriculture as a force in economic growth by: advancing scientific and technological research; investing in infrastructure; fostering higher technical training; and creating regional markets.
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.
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.
Background: Up to now, efforts to help local communities out of the food-insecurity trap were guided by researcher (or other actors)-led decisions on technologies to be implemented by the communities. This approach has proved inefficient because of low adoption of the so-called improved technologies. This paper describes the strategic approaches to the development of a climate-smart village (CSV) model in the groundnut basin of Senegal.