The Tanga Dairy Platform, created in 2008, is an informal forum of different stakeholders involved in the dairy industry of Tanzania’s Northeastern Tanga region. The platform’s objective is to exchange knowledge and develop joint actions to common problems. Six years on, it is a sustainable example of a commodity association addressing the joint problems of the region’s dairy industry.
The objective of this report is to assess the usefulness of providing guidance for scaling up good practices in core ARD business lines, and to test the prospects for doing so. The output of the document is a guide for a systematic discussion on scaling up of Competitive Grant Schemes (CGSs) for agricultural research and extension at key decision points during the life of an ARD project. This report addresses the other end of the state-of-practice spectrum - good practices and beyond.
This paper presents Thorvald II, a modular, highly re-configurable, all-weather mobile robot intended for applications in the agricultural domain. Researchers working with mobile agricultural robots tend to work in a wide variety of environments such as open fields, greenhouses, and polytunnels. Until now agricultural robots have been designed to operate in only one type of environment, with no or limited possibilities for customization.
Many smallholder farmers in developing countries grow multiple crop species on their farms, maintaining de facto crop diversity. Rarely do agricultural development strategies consider this crop diversity as an entry point for fostering agricultural innovation. This paper presents a case study, from an agricultural research-for-development project in northern Ghana, which examines the relationship between crop diversity and self-consumption of food crops, and cash income from crops sold by smallholder farmers in the target areas.
In this chapter the authors compute measures of total factor productivity (TFP) growth for developing countries and then contrast TFP growth with technological capital indexes. In developing these indexes, the authors incorporate schooling capital to yield two new indexes: Invention-Innovation Capital and Technology Mastery. They find that TFP performance is strongly related to technological capital and that technological capital is required for TFP and cost reduction growth.
This technical report covers the rapid assessment of agriculture finance and its recommendations, the findings of the situation and gap analysis of the Uganda Agricultural Insurance Scheme (UAIS), and where appropriate, presents the WBG’s recommendations for strengthening the scheme; it also includes a proposal for two additional insurance programs, one for crop and one for livestock, targeted at small-scale farmers.
In this paper, presented at the 8th European IFSA Symposium ( Workshop 6: "Change in knowledge systems and extension services: Role of the new actors") in 2008, the authors discuss a conceptual framework that understands innovation processes as the outcome of collaborative networks where information is exchanged and learning processes happen. They argue that technical and economic factors used to analyse drivers and barriers alone are not sufficient to understand innovation processes.
Presented at the ‘Building Livelihoods Resilience in a Changing Climate’ conference, Kuala Lumpur, 3-5th March 2011, this paper focuses on the Local Adaptive Capacity framework (LAC), developed under the Africa Climate Change Alliance Project (ACCRA), as an innovative initiative that attempts to move towards a better understanding of its core features through isolating five characteristics of adaptive capacity. Demonstrated through findings from field research across three African countries (Ethiopia, Mozambique and Uganda), this paper argues that frameworks for understanding and supporting
Intermediary actors have been proposed as key catalysts that speed up change towards more sustainable socio-technical systems. Research on this topic has gradually gained traction since 2009, but has been complicated by the inconsistency regarding what intermediaries are in the context of such transitions and which activities they focus on, or should focus on. This study briefly elaborates on the conceptual foundations of the studies of intermediaries in transitions, and how intermediaries have been connected to different transition theories.
3D Move To See (3DMTS) is a mutli-perspective visual servoing method for unstructured and occluded environments, like that encountered in robotic crop harvesting. This paper presents a deep learning method, Deep-3DMTS for creating a single-perspective approach for 3DMTS through the use of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The novel method is developed and validated via simulation against the standard 3DMTS approach.