This toolbox has been developed to collate different tools and methods that can be used for food system analysis.
It is specifically based on systems thinking for food system analysis, with the aim to formulate actionable recommendations that can bring about systemic change.It describes both the process of a food system analysis, as well as a set of tools that can be used at different stages.
Though Odisha is India’s top sweetpotato-producing state, most farmers grow low-yielding varieties of limited nutritional value. The Odisha Directorate of Horticulture and the International Potato Center (CIP) spent four years promoting improved varieties and good agricultural practices in four districts of Odisha, resulting in a 25 per cent growth in the area dedicated to the crop, a 17 per cent increase in farm productivity, and a 40 per cent increase in farmer incomes within the project areas; as well as the introduction of a nutritious, orange-fleshed sweetpotato variety.
Capacity building for integrating gender in research and development (R&D) on agricultural innovations often remains with organizing single gender training. Alternatively, it is often limited to hiring a gender specialist to allocate a small amount of her/his time to the project. This has proofed to be ineffective and a heavy burden for gender specialists. This success story presents an innovative approach to capacity development, which successfully changed agricultural researchers’ attitude to gender in Southeast Asia, with a specific focus in Vietnam.
Smallholder farmers’ organizations aim to help farmers to achieve a common goal. A counselor or an agribusiness development can give support through the diagnostic tools, that allow to give a picture of the organizations and to set a working strategy that will be used to address the identified problems of the organizations and assist farmers develop sustainable solutions for these problems.
This guide on Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning was prepared under the project Capacity Development for Agricultural Innovation Systems (CDAIS), a global partnership (Agrinatura, FAO and eight pilot countries) that aims to strengthen the capacity of countries and key stakeholders to innovate in complex agricultural systems, thereby achieving improved rural livelihoods. CDAIS uses a continuous learning cycle approach to support national agricultural innovation systems in eight countries in Africa, in Asia and Central America.
Esta guía del Proceso de Acompañamiento fue preparada bajo el proyecto Desarrollo de Capacidades para Sistemas de Innovación Agrícola (CDAIS), una asociación global (Agrinatura, FAO y ocho países piloto) que tiene como objetivo fortalecer la capacidad de los países y las partes involucradas para innovar en sistemas agrícolas complejos y así lograr mejores medios de vida en las zonas rurales. CDAIS utiliza un enfoque de ciclo de aprendizaje continuo para apoyar los sistemas nacionales de innovación agrícola en ocho países de África, Asia y América Central.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has developed a web-based Rift Valley fever (RVF) Early Warning Decision Support Tool (RVF DST), which integrates near real-time RVF risk maps with geospatial data, historical and current RVF disease events from EMPRES Global Animal Disease Information System (EMPRES-i) and expert knowledge on RVF eco-epidemiology.
ICT-driven digital tools to support smallholder farmers are arguably inevitable for agricultural development, and they are gradually evolving with promising outlook. Yet, the development and delivery of these tools to target users are often fraught with non-trivial, and sometimes unanticipated, contextual realities that can make or mar their adoption and sustainability. This article unfolds the experiential learnings from a digital innovation project focusing on surveillance and control of a major banana disease in East Africa which is being piloted in Rwanda.
The experiences shared in this book of Conversations of Change capture the outcomes of three years’ work conducted by the eight CDAIS country teams from Angola, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Honduras, Laos and Rwanda. Collected between January and March 2019, they provide insights and perspectives of different actors engaged in the different capacity strengthening processes, within individuals and innovation niche partnerships, and at organisational and national level.
Contract farming has gained in importance in many developing countries. Previous studies analysed effects of contracts on smallholder farmers’ welfare, yet mostlywithout considering that different types of contractual relationships exist. Here, we examine associations between contract farming and farm household income in the oilpalm sector of Ghana, explicitly differentiating between two types of contracts,namely simple marketing contracts and more comprehensive resource-providing contracts.