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.
Women play important roles at different nodes of both agricultural and off-farm value chains, but in many countries their contributions are either underestimated or limited by prevailing societal norms or gender-specific barriers. We use primary data collected in Asia (Bangladesh, Philippines) and Africa (Benin, Malawi) to examine the relationships between women’s empowerment, gender equality, and participation in a variety of local agricultural value chains that comprise the food system.
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.
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.
In the context of an exponential rise in access to information in the last two decades, this special issue explores when and how information might be harnessed to improve governance and public service delivery in rural areas. Information is a critical component of government and citizens’ decision-making; therefore, improvements in its availability and reliability stand to benefit many dimensions of governance, including service delivery.
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?
Research for development (R4D) projects increasingly engage in multi-stakeholder innovation platforms (IPs) asan innovation methodology, but there is limited knowledge of how the IP methodology spreads from one contextto another. That is, how experimentation with an IP approach in one context leads to it being succesfully re-plicated in other contexts.
Food insecurity and the weak position of smallholders in food value chains are key challenges in many low- and middle-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa. In order to increase food security and make agricultural value chains more inclusive, donors, governments and researchers increasingly stimulate partnerships between multiple actors, in which knowledge exchange, joint learning and knowledge co-creation play a central role in reducing the time lag between research findings and their translation into practical outcomes.
This article highlights the experiences and lessons generated by the project collaborators in enhancing the adaptive capacities of selected upland farming communities in Southeast Asia. The project collaborators employed capability building programs, such as farmers' and technicians' training, local climate change awareness programs, cross-farm visits, demonstration plots showcasing agroforestry technologies as climate change adaptation (CCA) strategies, and linking science with policies