Strengthening the abilities of smallholder farmers in developing countries, particularly women farmers, to produce for both home and the market is currently a development priority. In many contexts, ownership of assets is strongly gendered, reflecting existing gender norms and limiting women’s ability to invest in more profitable livelihood strategies such as market-oriented agriculture. Yet the intersection between women’s asset endowments and their ability to participate in and benefit from agricultural interventions receives minimal attention.
The purpose of this research was designed to investigate the impact of e-Agriculture on farmers of Bangladesh. Empowerment is stratified as economic, family and social, political, knowledge and psychological empowerment. Data were collected in Bhatbour Block of Dhighi union under Sadar Upazila of Minikganj District. Data were collected in two phases from the same group of respondents (in August, 2013 and September, 2015). Two sample t test and step-wise multiple regression method were used for analysis.
Global technology education is largely dominated by Western universities. Students from developing countries face an enormous challenge when moving from their local education system into the competitive international education market. Their local knowledge gets lost in a foreign education system where the students are required to acquire a new set of skills. This paper presents a survey among international technology students that highlights the differences.
Agriculture in South Asia is vulnerable to climate change. Therefore, adaptation measures are required to sustain agricultural productivity, to reduce vulnerability, and to enhance the resilience of the agricultural system to climate change. There are many adaptation practices in the production systems that have been proposed and tested for minimizing the effects of climate change. Some socioeconomic and political setup contributes to adaptation, while others may inhibit it.
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?
Women play important roles at different nodes of both agricultural and off-farm value chains, but in many countries their contributions are either underestimated or limited by prevailing societal norms or gender-specific barriers. We use primary data collected in Asia (Bangladesh, Philippines) and Africa (Benin, Malawi) to examine the relationships between women’s empowerment, gender equality, and participation in a variety of local agricultural value chains that comprise the food system.
Ethiopian agriculture is changing as new actors, relationships, and policies influence the ways in which small-scale, resource-poor farmers access and use information and knowledge in their agricultural production decisions. Although these changes suggest new opportunities for smallholders, too little is known about how changes will ultimately improve the wellbeing of smallholders in Ethiopia. The authors of this paper examine whether these changes are improving the ability of smallholders to innovate and thus improve their own welfare.
This paper characterises some of the main issues confronting water-catchment managing in a climate-changing world and addresses wide-spread concerns about the lack of connectivity between science, policy making and implementation. The paper’s arguments are ‘framed’ within a paradigm of systemic and adaptive governing, regulating, planning and managing understood as a nested systemic hierarchy. It is argued that climate change adaptation is best understood as a coevolutionary dynamic, principally, but not exclusively between human beings and the biophysical world.
Communities of Practice (CoPs) are a promising concept for transdisciplinary knowledge co-creation in sustainable agricultural development, but empirical evidence from the farmers’ viewpoint is scarce. This paper contributes to empirical insights on the knowledge creation in CoPs as valued by farmers. Using concepts from CoP theory (domain, community, and practice) and the value creation framework (VCF) developed by Wenger et al. (Promoting and assessing value creation in communities and networks: a conceptual framework.
Recent research on agricultural innovation has outlined social networks’ role in diffusing agricultural knowledge; however, so far, it has broadly neglected the socio-spatial dimensions of innovation processes. Against this backdrop, the authors applies a spatially explicit translocal network perspective in order to investigate the role of migration-related translocal networks for adaptive change in a small-scale farming community in Northeast Thailand.