This report provides a synthesis of all findings and information generated through a “stocktaking” process that involved a desk study of Prolinnova documents and evaluation reports, a questionnaire to 40 staff members of international organizations in agricultural research and development (ARD), self-assessment by the Country Platforms (CPs) and backstopping visits to five CPs. In 2014, the Prolinnova network saw a need to re-strategise in a changing context, and started this process by reviewing the activities it had undertaken and assessing its own functioning.
This paper draws lessons from selected country experiences of adaptation and innovation in pursuit of food security goals.
This book is the re-titled third edition of the widely used Agricultural Extension (van den Ban & Hawkins, 1988, 1996). Building on the previous editions,Communication for Rural Innovation maintains and adapts the insights and conceptual models of value today, while reflecting many new ideas, angles and modes of thinking concerning how agricultural extension is taught and carried through today.
Apart from the introduction and conclusion, the contents of this book are organised around a number of case studies, grouped into two main chapters.
Society’s learning capacity in the field of sustainable land resource management is at stake and more emphasis on knowledge management is needed to guarantee that the accumulated knowledge is shared in such a way that the right actors have appropriate knowledge at the right time to take the best decisions. Efficient policies governing structures for national and regional knowledge management need to be formulated and the working procedures of the various actors in the field need to be defined more sharply.
Small-scale farmers' experimental innovations have not generally been considered for on-farm research trials as those in the traditional sector have been perceived as recipients, rather than originators, of technical knowledge and sustainable and viable practices. Yet there is abundant evidence throughout the tropics that small-scale farmers are adaptive and experimental problem solvers, and experts at devising innovative survival strategies. While literature on the topic is rich with accounts from Africa, Asia and Latin America, there is a general dearth of examples from the Caribbean.
Classical innovation adoption models implicitly assume homogenous information flow across farmers, which is often not realistic. As a result, selection bias in adoption parameters may occur. We focus on tissue culture (TC) banana technology that was introduced in Kenya more than 10 years ago. Up till now, adoption rates have remained relatively low.
Mobile phones fit well into the lives of pastoralists in low-income countries. The technology is firmly integrated into most pastoralist communities, affecting and transforming several core activities. Most studies concerned with this relationship, however, have narrow regional and thematic foci. The complementarity or discrepancy between relevant research is unknown, and a critical assessment of the current state of research is lacking.
This book is about the challenges and practical realities of building the capacity to innovate. It describes the experiences of the Research Into Use (RIU) programme, a five-year, multi-country investment by DFID that aimed to extract development impact from past investments in agricultural research. Specifically, it explores different approaches through which innovation capacities were built.
Seed is the starting point of plant life, and hence the most fundamental input of agriculture. A seed system that assures the availability of the desired quality of seed to the producer at the right time is indispensable for his farming enterprise. In the case of the potato crop, the seed most commonly used is strictly speaking no seed, but a tuber. The constraints and opportunities in seed potato systems in East Africa are of a combined social, economic and technical nature.