This document is accompanyng the volume Public Agricultural Research in an Era of Transformation: The Challenge of Agri-Food System Innovation (available in TAPipedia here), which provides some of the groundwork in answering the question of how the CGIAR system and other public agricultural research organisations should adapt and respond to an era of transformation framed by the SDGs.
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.
Following their first formation in Indonesia over 25 years ago, Farmer Field Schools (FFS) have served as a “proof of concept” of how transformative learning can help governments, donors and development stakeholders achieve development objectives. The FFS approach, which has now been used in more than 90 countries by more than 12 million small farmers (FAO, 2016), not only creates a space in which the practical needs of smallholders to solve production-related issues can be addressed but also fosters personal and community-level transformation through empowerment.
The Applied Research and Innovation Systems in Agriculture project (ARISA) started in December 2014 with the aim of increasing net farm income for 10,000 smallholder farming households in eastern Indonesia. The project was designed to address a key challenge in agricultural research for development: how to ensure that proven research outputs1 are available and accessible for use in farming communities.
Capacity development interventions in support of agricultural innovation are more effective when based on systematic and participatory assessments of existing skills and capacity needs. Recognizing that, an instrument has been developed in the context of the Capacity Development for Agricultural Innovation Systems (CDAIS) project. It consists of a capacity scoring tool that allows assessing innovation capacities, identifying strengths and weaknesses and monitoring capacity changes over time. This paper describes the scoring tool and provides guidelines on how to apply it successfully.
This concept note has been developed within the context of the EU-funded CDAIS project, which is jointly implemented by AGRINATURA-EEIG and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) to support the TAP Action Plan in eight pilot countries in Africa (Angola, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Rwanda), Asia (Bangladesh, Laos) and Central America (Guatemala, Honduras) .
This training manual was prepared under the EU-funded project Capacity Development for Agricultural Innovation Systems (CDAIS), a global partnership (Agrinatura, FAO and 8 pilot countries) that aims to strengthen the capacity of countries and key stakeholders to innovate in complex agricultural systems, thereby achieving improved rural livelihoods.
The timeline tool is generally put to use when stakeholders embark upon the self-assessment phase of their innovation partnership. Stakeholders are asked to recall moments they feel were significant for the partnership, from its beginning to the present and to reflect upon how the partnership has evolved since it began.
The capacity-focused problem tree pinpoints a core capacity issue, along with its causes and effects. It helps clarify the precise capacity-development objectives that the intervention aims to achieve. The focus should be on functional capacity, but room should be left to acknowledge technical capacity issues too.
This tool enables participants to become cognisant of the functional capacities discovered through the capacity scoring questionnaire, and test the limits of these capacities through simulations or role-playing (e.g. problem-solving, collaboration, information sharing, and engagement). The simulation game leads to an intuitive understanding of innovation capacities and of the importance of the enabling environment, helping participants to learn about the significance of these capacities.