This is a chapter of the book Innovation platforms for agricultural development edited by Iddo Dror, Jean-Joseph Cadilhon, Marc Schut, Michael Misiko and Shreya Maheshwari.

Over the past few decades, some countries in Asia have been more successful than others in addressing poverty and malnutrition. The key question is what policies, strategies, legislation and institutional arrangements have led to a transformed agricultural sector, effectively contributing to poverty alleviation and addressing malnutrition. The great majority of national policymakers within and outside the Asia-Pacific region are keen to understand the causes of agricultural development and transformation in successful countries in Asia.

This book summarizes the achievements as well as some of the challenges faced while implementing integrated systems research to support the sustainable development of smallholder farming in the uplands of the Mekong region.

This brochure on Global Knowledge Product provides an update of work carried out in 2020 on the development of some selected strategies, guidelines for the assessment of innovation systems, strategies for promoting agricultural innovation, and knowledge portals for sharing of technologies and good practices that integrate sustainable agricultural production and food security. The development of knowledge products contributes to FAO’s strategic objective of making agriculture, forestry, and fisheries more productive and sustainable.

The “E-learning methodologies” guide aims to support professionals involved in the design and development of e-learning projects and products. The guide reviews the basic concepts of e-learning with a focus on adult learning, and introduces the various activities and roles involved in an e-learning project. The guide covers methodologies and tips for creating interactive content and for facilitating online learning, as well as some of the technologies used to create and deliver e-learning.

This Module is the first in a series of four that address capacity development competencies in FAO. It is intended to provide FAO staff and consultants with a basic understanding and knowledge of Capacity Development (CD), reflecting the international debate as well as FAO’s perspective on CD. It also provides some key concepts for adopting changes in responsibilities, behaviours and attitudes that are consistent with FAO’s new role in CD. 

An innovation platform is a space for learning and change. It is a group of individuals (who often represent organizations) with different backgrounds and interests: farmers, traders, food processors, researchers, government officials etc. The members come together to diagnose problems, identify opportunities and find ways to achieve their goals. They may design and implement activities as a platform, or coordinate activities by individual members. This brief explains what innovation platforms are and how they work, and it describes some of their advantages and limitations.

The global impacts of the climate crisis are becoming ever clearer, and natural resources and ecosystems are being depleted. Despite some progress, hunger and poverty persist, and inequalities are deepening. The world is realizing that unsustainable high external inputs and resource-intensive industrialized systems pose a real danger of biodiversity loss, increased greenhouse gas emissions, shortages of healthy food, and the impoverishment of dispossessed peasants around the world.

The Outcome mapping factsheet provides a series of steps to gather information on the outcomes of the process initiated by capacity development for agricultural innovation. This tool provides an overview of the outcome mapping methodology used for planning and assessing projects/programmes oriented towards change and social transformation. A simplified version (three stages and 10 steps) is proposed, based on the original IDRC methodology and experiences from the application in the CDAIS project.