The Agribusiness and Market Development (AMDe) project is funded through USAID Ethiopia’s Feed the Future program from June 2011 to May 2016.  It goal is to sustainably reduce poverty and hunger by improving the productivity and competiveness of agricultural value chains that offer jobs and income activities for rural households.

 This report describes issues presented and discussed at a workshop held in Rwanda from 6 - 8 September 2012, focused on strengthening capacity in agricultural innovation in post-conflict and protracted crisis (2PC) countries. It was the first workshop of its kind that attempted to bring participants from 2PC countries around the globe to rally around a common cause.

Strengthening the capacity of farmer training centers (FTCs) in Ethiopia and enhancing FTC‐based training and knowledge services is important to leverage and optimize potential contributions of FTCs to facilitating market‐led and knowledge‐based agricultural transformation.

On 15 November 2012, as part of the IFAD East and Southern Africa regional meeting in Addis Ababa, ILRI was asked to convene and facilitate a 1 hour session on ways that CGIAR and IFAD could collaborate. The session drew on contributions from different CGIAR centres; it involved speakers from ILRI, IWMI and ICARDA. It provided a very good, but short, opportunity to make connections between some CGIAR staff and IFAD and project staff; several individual follow up conversations were triggered. 

The Nile Story is one of immense challenges and remarkable achievements for the economic development of the region. It begins in 1999, when the ministers in charge of water affairs in the Nile countries agreed to form the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI). Between 2003 and 2015, the Nile Basin Trust Fund (NBTF) supported and coordinated cooperative work in the region, which has been delivered mainly through the NBI.

One of the most important things that innovation platforms do is to build the capacity of their members to innovate. Some key elements of innovation capacity include: self-organization, learning new skills, changing mindsets, valuing others’ roles in innovation, having a holistic view, being able to adapt to changing situations, creating new ideas, recognizing opportunities, being proactive, using indigenous ideas, and looking to the future. This brief uses the analogy of a traditional African cooking pot to explain how innovation capacity is developed within an innovation platform.

The Africa Research in Sustainable Intensification for the Next Generation (Africa RISING) program, supported by the United States Agency for International Development, aims to create opportunities for smallholder farm households to move out of hunger and poverty through sustainably intensified farming systems that improve food, nutrition, and income security, particularly for women and children, and conserve or enhance the natural resource base.

Much has been written on the determinants of technology adoption in agriculture, with issues such as input availability, knowledge and education, risk preferences, profitability, and credit constraints receiving much attention. This paper focuses on a factor that has been less well documented: the differential ability of households to take on risky production technologies for fear of the welfare consequences if shocks result in poor harvests. Building on an explicit model, this is explored in panel data from Ethiopia. Historical rainfall distributions are used to identify consumption risk.

The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) initiated a 5 year project in June 2004 with the financial assistance from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). The project, entitled: “Improving productivity and market success” (IPMS) of Ethiopian farmers, aims at contributing to a reduction in poverty of the rural poor through market oriented agricultural development.

This document intends to provide an analysis of the outcomes of the application of the TAP Common Framework in the eight countries of the Capacity Development for Agricultural Innovation Systems (CDAIS) project.  The TAP Common Framework (TAP CF) was developed at the global level as an initial activity of the CDAIS project in order to guide capacity development (CD) and strengthening of Agricultural Innovation Systems (AIS). The project then tested this framework in eight pilot countries (Guatemala, Honduras, Burkina Faso, Angola, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Lao PDR, Bangladesh).