The 2016 Global Agricultural Productivity Report advocates policies and innovations in five key areas to help the agriculture and food sectors manage uncertain seasons of fluctuating business cycles and climate change, while fostering competitiveness today and sustainable growth tomorrow.
This study introduces a framework for managing information flow in innovation systems. An organisation's capacity to receive information, to share it with others and to learn from it is assumed to be the key factor that shapes the flow patterns and, hence, the performance of the innovation system concerned. The framework is applied to characterise the information structure underlying the agricultural innovation system of Azerbaijan and to develop an information strategy for the system to accelerate the information flow.
Technological innovations have driven economic development and improvement in living conditions throughout history. However, the majority of smallholder farmers in sub‐Saharan Africa have seldom adopted or used science‐based technological innovations. Consequently, several scholars have been persistently questioning the effectiveness of intervention models in smallholder agriculture.
The first part of the working document on the global strategy brings together the ideas of some 40 experts involved in gender and participatory research who took part in the workshop ‘Repositioning Participatory Research and Gender Analysis in Times of Change’ in Cali, Colombia (June 16–18, 2010).The workshop participants firmly believe that gender responsive participatory research (GRPR) offers some of the most powerful and useful approaches for achieving sustainable development, including alleviating poverty, improving well being, achieving sustainable levels of natural resource use, and
The Guide to Effective Collaborative Action is built on the foundation of 10 years' experience in transforming food and agricultural commodity systems by UNDP's Green Commodities Programme. It is broadening the application from support to commodity production to the transformation of food systems. The four building blocks of putting systems change into practice, integrated with backbone support and essential practices for stakeholder actions, provide a framework for Changing Systems through Collaborative Action.
Growing local and informal markets in Asia and Africa provide both challenges and opportunities for small holders. In developing countries, market failures often lead to suboptimal performance of the value chains and limited and inequitable participation of the poor. In recent years, innovation platforms have been promoted as mechanisms to stimulate and support multistakeholder collaboration in the context of research for development. They are recognized as having the potential to link value chain actors, and enhance communication and collaboration to overcome market failures.
Local extension agents can benefit from the simple procedures in developing irrigation calendars for other irrigated crops. This study gives important lesson for local and regional decision makers, on their endeavour to increase the productivity of small scale irrigated agriculture. This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 describes the study area, practical irrigation schedule development method, alternative irrigation schedules and data collection and analysis methods. Section 3 presents the results.
This practitioner’s guide, a companion volume to The Innovation Paradox picks up where the previous report left off. It aims to help policy makers in developing countries better formulate innovation policies. It does so by providing a rigorous typology of innovation policy instruments, including evidence of impact—and more importantly, the critical conditions in terms of institutional capabilities to successfully implement these policy instruments in developing countries.
ICT-driven digital tools to support smallholder farmers are arguably inevitable for agricultural development, and they are gradually evolving with promising outlook. Yet, the development and delivery of these tools to target users are often fraught with non-trivial, and sometimes unanticipated, contextual realities that can make or mar their adoption and sustainability. This article unfolds the experiential learnings from a digital innovation project focusing on surveillance and control of a major banana disease in East Africa which is being piloted in Rwanda.
Several posters have been created on the occasion of the 5th TAP Partners Assembly (Laos, 20-22 September 2017) to show recent activities and achievements in the eight pilot countries of the CDAIS project.