The devastation caused in Philippines by Typhoon Reming was the trigger for the Government request to FAO for the project “Strengthening Capacities for Climate Risk Management and Disaster Preparedness in Selected Provinces of the Philippines (Bicol Region)”. This technical project summary report provides a consolidated overview about the specific project activities, the implementation processes, main findings and the establishment of institutional mechanisms that were established to promote ongoing collaboration between farmers, agriculture extension workers, researchers and local governme
This Training of Trainers Manual is designed to help build the capacity of trainers in flash flood risk management, who can then disseminate the knowledge to a larger number of practitioners. The manual presents an eight-day course including a three-day field trip. Detailed lesson plans for 21 sessions are followed by resource materials that will enable the trainers to replicate the course in their own work areas.
What can we learn from ongoing initiatives? There has been a lot of interest during the last two decades in employing Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for achieving development. While many of these initiatives have benefited rural women by way of access to new information and new employment opportunities, women still face a number of constraints in accessing ICTs. This paper explores the role of ICTs in empowering Indian rural women, through a review of ICT initiatives in India.
Innovation is largely held to be unlikely in rural regions. This reflects the current emphasis on regional innovations systems that are driven by large expenditures on formal science based activity that results in patentable outcomes. From this metric the observation about rural innovation is largely true. However, a broader concept of innovation, which includes the actions of individual inventors/entrepreneurs opens the possibility of rural innovation.
This book contains a collection of papers that discuss the experience of an Agricultural Research for Development (AR4D) capacity building program in Papua New Guinea (PNG). The program was the AusAID-funded Agricultural Research and Development Support Facility (ARDSF), which ran for fi ve years from 2007 to 2012, and which sought to improve the delivery of services by agricultural research organisations to smallholder farmers.
This volume is devided into three parts. The first part describes on-going
processes of change within, or aside, the socio-technical regime that we have
inherited from the modernisation and industrialisation process of agriculture,
which took part after the second world-war. The focus in this part is on studies
dealing with the issue of agro-ecological initiatives born in niches of organic
movement, which are questioning the mainstream regime of industrialised
agriculture.
There is renewed attention on the importance of advisory services and extension in rural development processes. This paper, based on the publication ‘Mobilizing the potential of rural and agricultural extension', focuses on five opportunities to mobilise the potential of extension and advisory services. The five areas are: (1) focusing on best-fit approaches; (2) embracing pluralism; (3) using participatory approaches; (4) developing capacity; and (5) ensuring long-term institutional support.
This study reports on the contribution of farmer– to-farmer video-mediated group learning to capital assets building of women in resource-poor households. Data were collected using structured interviews with 140 randomly selected women in 28 video villages and 40 women in four control villages in north-west Bangladesh. Video-mediated group learning enhanced women’s ability to apply and experiment with seed technologies. It also stimulated reciprocal sharing of new knowledge and skills between them, other farmers and service providers.
This set of guidance notes is designed to support practitioners and evaluators in conducting retrospective evaluations of a capacity development intervention or portfolio to assess and document results. Users will enhance their understanding of the capacity development process, of what works and what does not work in promoting change and to inform future programs. The standard M&E approach for assessing capacity development results has not been sufficient.
This Guide is prepared based on the concepts, principles and practices of the innovation systems, with particular reference to integrated agricultural research for development (IAR4D) which uses innovation platforms (IPs) in agriculture value chains and food systems. The contents of this Guide have been informed by the experiences and lessons learned from the IPs in agriculture value chains and food systems of CORAF/WECARD, National Agricultural Research Systems (NARS) and FARA projects, as well as the CTA’s training.