Over the last 10 years much has been written about the role of the private sector as part of a more widely-conceived notion of agricultural sector capacity for innovation and development. This paper discusses the emergence of a new class of private enterprise in East Africa that would seem to have an important role in efforts to tackle poverty reduction and food security. These organisations appear to occupy a niche that sits between mainstream for-profit enterprises and the developmental activities of government programmes, NGOs and development projects.
RIU is a research and development programme designed to put agricultural research into use for developmental purposes and to conduct research on how to do this. The programme is funded by the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID). It follows earlier investments by DFID in agricultural and natural resources research, supported through its renewable natural resources research strategy (RRNRRS). While this strategy delivered high-quality research, the uptake of this research and its impact on social and economic progress was modest.
Research and analysis of agricultural innovation processes and policies over the last 20 years has made a major contribution to scholarship on and the understanding of the nature of innovation. To an important, but much lesser degree this has also led to re-framing practice at the research-innovation interface. Innovation studies (for want of a better word), like many branches of science, finds that it needs to deliver solutions across the full spectrum of discovery (concepts and theories) to application in both policy and practice domains.