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.
The objective of this chapter is to describe the processes and experiences of forming country project teams, partnership models and approaches to reach farmers in Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi. This will improve understanding of methods of setting up sustainable partnerships that exist beyond donor-funded projects
This paper describes the strategic approaches to the development of a climate-smart village (CSV) model in the groundnut basin of Senegal. A CSV model is a participatory integrated approach using climate information, improved context-based technologies/practices aiming at reaching improved productivity (food and nutrition security), climate resilient people and ecosystem and climate mitigation.
This paper was synthesized from several scholarly literature and aimed at providing up-to-date information on climate change impacts, adaptation strategies, policies and institutional mechanisms that each agriculture subsector had put in place in dealing with climate change and its related issues in West Africa. For each subsector (crop, fishery and livestock), the current status, climate change impacts, mitigation and adaption strategies have been analyzed
This paper asks: What have been the impacts of farmer- or community-led (informal) processes of research and development in agriculture and natural resource management in terms of food security, ecological sustainability, economic empowerment, gender relations, local capacity to innovate and influence on formal agricultural research and development institutions?
This brief draws on three cases to show how the private sector contributes to the conceptualisation, design, delivery and evaluation of climate-smart agricultural interventions and can help bring them to scale. Engaging the private sector in CSA interventions enhances the applicability – and thus the sustainability of interventions, increases uptake and delivers a triple win for donors, beneficiaries and the private sector.
The failure of the linear and non-participatory Agricultural Research and Development approaches to increase food security among smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa has prompted researchers to introduce an Integrated Agricultural Research for Development (IAR4D) concept. The IAR4D concept uses Innovation Platforms (IPs) to embed agricultural research and development organizations in a network to undertake multidisciplinary and participatory research.
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.
Les Nations unies ont désigné 2014 comme l’Année internationale de l’agriculture familiale. À l’échelle de la planète, la population agricole est estimée à 2,6 milliards de personnes, soit 40 % de la population totale. Avec 1,3 milliard d’actifs, l’agriculture demeure le premier secteur d’emploi au niveau mondial. Dans les pays en développement, là où 70% de la population reste liée aux activités agricoles, l’alimentation des familles dépend essentiellement de la production vivrière et des marchés locaux. Aujourd’hui, défendre l’agriculture familiale ne suffit plus.