Land and property rights, migration, and citizenship are complex issues that cut across all social, economic, and political spheres of West Africa. This paper provides an overarching scoping of the most pressing contemporary issues related to land, migration, and citizenship, including how they intersect in various contexts and locations in West Africa. The way issues are analytically framed captures structural challenges and sets them against the regional and global meta-trends of which policy makers and practitioners should be aware for conflict-sensitive planning.
Based on international literature, preliminary experiences in a three-country West African research programme, and on the disappointing impact of agricultural research on African farm innovation, the current paper argues that institutional change demands rethinking the pathways to innovation so as to acknowledge the role of rules, distribution of power and wealth, interaction and positions. The time is opportune: climate change, food insecurity, high food prices and concomitant riots are turning national food production into a political issue also for African leaders.
African agriculture is currently at a crossroads, at which persistent food shortages are compounded by threats from climate change. But, as this book argues, Africa can feed itself in a generation and help contribute to global food security. To achieve this Africa has to define agriculture as a force in economic growth by: advancing scientific and technological research; investing in infrastructure; fostering higher technical training; and creating regional markets.
This publication provides a collection of papers, commentaries, expert opinions and reflections on state-of-the-art innovation systems thinking and approaches in agriculture. It is the direct output of a CTA and WUR/CoS-SIS collaboration which had its genesis in an expert consultation on ‘Innovation Systems: Towards Effective Strategies in support of Smallholder Farmers’.
This study was set out to describe the operation of the agricultural multi-stakeholder platforms and assess the impact of their activities on the production and revenue of the different beneficiaries. The required data was collected from 285 stakeholders using structured questionnaires. The econometric approach based on the Local Average Treatment effect (LATE) was used to identify the impact of the participation in the MSP activities on the revenue and yield of the producers
This article used thematic content analysis to assess the influence of IPs on the governance of the parboiled rice value chain. The findings reveal that local rice value chains are characterized by unequal access to resources and asymmetry of power, which generates inequalities within groups. Although their influence is less discernible, IPs have contributed to greater visibility for some emerging stakeholders and rebalanced stakeholders in terms of influence in value chains
L’étude a contribué à améliorer la chaîne de valeur (CVA) maïs grain blanc grâce à des liens et relations plus structurés entre ses acteurs. L’Approche Recherche Intégrée pour le Développement a été utilisée à travers le suivi strict de toutes ses étapes pour installer une plateforme d’innovations dans la commune de Matéri et promouvoir les relations inter-acteurs. Les résultats de l’application de l’approche multi-acteurs ont fait ressortir le maïs grain blanc comme chaîne de valeur prioritaire dans la zone d’étude.
Les plateformes d’innovation (PI) sont perçues aujourd’hui comme les approches les plus adéquates de développement et de promotion des innovations agricoles. Mais la plupart des précédentes études se sont focalisées à la description des résultats obtenus sans approfondir les facteurs sous-tendant ces résultats.
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.
This paper discusses external influences on innovation platforms (IPs) and the options for effective responses. The platforms examined in this paper were conceived as vehicles for facilitating institutional change in support of innovation that benefits smallholders, in selected agro-enterprise domains in Benin, Ghana and Mali. They were designed and implemented in a manner that enabled experimentation with processes of change in the selected domains.