The privatization of agricultural advisory and extension services in many countries and the associated pluralism of service providers has renewed interest in farmers’ use of fee-for-service advisors. Understanding farmers’ use of advisory services is important, given the role such services are expected to play in helping farmers address critical environmental and sustainability challenges. This paper aims to identify factors associated with farmers’ use of fee-for service advisors and bring fresh conceptualization to this topic.
The concept of an innovation system is used to understand how innovation contributes to economic growth. However, innovation systems do not evolve evenly in different parts of the world. This paper contributes to the ongoing debate on the emergence of innovation systems in the context of developing countries. It uses the Rwandan case, where agriculture is a dominant socio-economic sector with high innovation potential. It explores how stakeholder interactions and policies contribute to the emergence of an agriculture innovation system in Rwanda.
Where CGIAR breeding programs rely on the private sector for the multiplication and distribution of improved cultivars, persistent challenges have dampened their impact on varietal adoption and turnover rates. Part of the problem is that research and practice in CGIAR and among its national breeding program partners tend to treat the private sector as a vehicle for seed delivery, rather than as commercial businesses facing a range of unique constraints and threats.
La plateforme d’innovation (PI) est une approche multi-acteurs pour des solutions aux problèmes complexes. Elle est d’actualité en Afrique Subsaharienne confrontée à de nombreux défis agricoles. Cette étude utilise une perspective systémique pour comprendre le processus de génération et de diffusion d’innovation relative à la post-récolte du riz local au Bénin. La collecte des données quantitatives et qualitatives a été faite avec des questionnaire et guides d’entretien auprès de 300 femmes étuveuses de riz, membres de la PI à Malanville, et sélectionnées de façon aléatoire et stratifiée.
A fragmented digital agriculture ecosystem has been linked to the slow scale-out of digital platforms and other digital technology solutions for agriculture. This has undermined the prospects of digitalizing agriculture and increasing sectoral outcomes in sub-Saharan African countries. We conceptualized an aggregator platform for digital services in agriculture as a special form of digital platforms that can enhance the value and usage of digital technologies at the industry level. Little is known about how such a platform can create value as a new service ecology in agriculture.
The evolution of mobile phone applications has opened up a platform for easy and real time dissemination and exchange of agricultural information among agricultural extension officers, farmers, agricultural institutions and non-governmental institutions. This study examined attitude, knowledge and constraint associated with the use of mobile phone apps by farmers in North West region of Nigeria. A descriptive survey design was adopted; data collection tool was pre-tested and administered as interview schedule to randomly sampled farmers.
The aim of this survey is to identify and characterize new products in plant biotechnology since 2015, especially in relation to the advent of New Breeding Techniques (NBTs) such as gene editing based on the CRISPR-Cas system. Transgenic (gene transfer or gene silencing) and gene edited traits which are approved or marketed in at least one country, or which have a non-regulated status in the USA, are collected, as well as related patents worldwide. In addition, to shed light on potential innovation for Africa, field trials on the continent are examined.
Growing empirical evidence suggests that innovation platforms can be effective in enhancing agricultural research impact by creating an enabling environment for scaling of innovations such as novel technologies, practices and busines models . However, efforts to understand how these innovation platforms operate to scale innovations are insufficient. Such knowledge is critical for improving the design of agricultural innovation systems, specifically within the context of a rising interest in the innovation platform approach to support the transformation of agriculture across Africa.
The paper studies the entrepreneurial behavior of large cardamom growers in Lamjung District, Nepal and was conducted from December 2017 to June 2018 in Marshyangdi Rural Municipality of Lamjung district. The Rural Municipality was selected purposely for the study due to the recent establishment of Cardamom Zone under the Prime Minister Agriculture Modernization Project in the Municipality focusing on large cardamom development. Altogether 80 large cardamom growers were selected randomly from 454 large cardamom growers of the study site.
The European Union (EU) promotes collaboration across functions and borders in its funded innovation projects, which are seen as complex collaboration to co-create knowledge. This requires the engagement of multiple stakeholders throughout the duration of the project. To probe complexity in EU-funded innovation projects the research question is: How does complexity affect the co-creation of knowledge in innovation projects, according to project participants?