This chapter documents the learning process within the framework of innovation of soil fertility management practices that emerged from the implementation of Participatory Extension Approach (PEA) as part of service delivery reorientation within the Limpopo Department of Agriculture in South Africa.The chapter gives a narrative description of what transpired during the interaction between researchers, extension officers and farmers, the processes involved, the lessons and the conclusion.
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
The frequency and severity of uncertain rainfall and climate extremes are projected to increase across many parts of the world. Access to rainfall forecasting information becomes an essential and critical resource that smallholder farmers should use to take advantage of good rains and avoid its adverse effects. In many smallholder farming communities, the reliability and accuracy of the scientific information is questionable and therefore not adequately used to make informed farming decisions.
The development community has shown increasing interest in the potential of innovation systems and value chain development approaches for reducing poverty and stimulating greater gender equity in rural areas. Nevertheless, there is a shortage of systematic knowledge on how such approaches have been implemented in different contexts, the main challenges in their application, and how they can be scaled to enable large numbers of poor people to benefit from participation in value chains.
Here, it is described a new participatory protocol for assessing the climate-smartness of agricultural interventions in smallholder practices. This identifies farm-level indicators (and indices) for the food security and adaptation pillars of CSA. It also supports the participatory scoring of indicators, enabling baseline and future assessments of climate-smartness to be made. The protocol was tested among 72 farmers implementing a variety of CSA interventions in the climate-smart village of Lushoto, Tanzania.
In this chapter, it is applied the CGPE model to analyzing the performance of policy processes with respect to the production of efficient policy choices. Within the CGPE approach participation of stakeholder organizations is modeled in two ways. First, as classical lobbying influence and second as informational influence within a model of political belief formation.
This chapter proposes a network-based framework to analyze and evaluate participatory and evidence-based policy processes. Four network based performance indicators are derived by incorporating a network model of political belief formation into a political bargaining model of the Baron–Grossmann–Helpman type. The application of our approach to the CAADP reform in Malawi delivers the following results: (i) beyond incentive problems, i.e.
Research-based evidence on the adoption of climate-smart agricultural practices is vital to their effective uptake, continued use and wider diffusion. In addition, an enabling policy environment at the national and regional levels is necessary for this evidence to be used effectively. This chapter analyzes a 4-year period of continuous policy engagement in East Africa in an attempt to understand the role of multi-stakeholder platforms (MSPs) in facilitating an enabling policy environment for climate change adaptation and mitigation.
This policy paper provides a macro-level picture of youth’s inability to access agriculture finance, and provides six major recommendations to policy makers: 1) promote financial literacy for youth 2) enhance the capability of financial institutions to assess agricultural sector opportunities; 3) African governments should produce and share reliable statistics on youth employment in agriculture and their financial inclusion; 4) policy makers should encourage special finance packages for young agripreneurs that do not require fixed collateral, e.g.
The central question in increasing productivity and generating incomes in African agriculture is how to move from technology generation to innovations that respond to constraints of agricultural production along the value chains. This question was considered in the context of subsistence agriculture, smallholder production systems, inefficient marketing and investments by the private sector, a preponderance of public interventions, and inadequate policies.