A worthy agricultural innovation system (AIS) is one that that helps an agricultural sector be productive, sustainable and resilient and facilitates reduction in poverty and malnutrition. How can an AIS be made resilient in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic is a question pondered in this note. The key issue will be continued strong investment in knowledge and technology creation that underpins growth in productivity and the active pursuit of mechanisms that make agriculture more resilient to the emerging environments challenges around the world.
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) funded the Assets and Market Access Innovation Lab (AMA IL) to advance knowledge and understanding of development approaches and technologies in order to increase rural households’ ability to acquire, protect, and effectively utilize productive assets. This evaluation assessed AMA IL’s overall program performance across five themes: research quality; outreach and dissemination; policy; capacity building; program management; and future directions.
The first section provides a brief overview of the key opportunities for rural women, and the key challenges that they face. The purpose of the section is to explain why it is important to address dimensions of gender equality in investments around food and nutrition security and agriculture. The second section guides the reader through the steps required to integrate gender dimensions into the design of an investment.
Extension and advisory services (EAS) play a key role in facilitating innovation processes, empowering marginalized groups through capacity development, and linking farmers with markets. EAS are increasingly provided by a range of actors and funded from diverse sources. With the broadened scope of EAS and the growing complexity of the system, the quantitative performance indicators used in the past (for example related to investment, staffing or productivity) are no longer adequate to assess the performance of EAS systems.
This publication is one of four CABI briefings on climate change. The key messages in this briefing are:
The Commission on Sustainable Agriculture Intensification (CoSAI) and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) jointly commissioned a gap study to determine how far away innovation investment is from helping agri-food systems achieve zero hunger goals and the Paris Agreement while reducing impacts on water resources in the Global South. The results show that the world can come much closer with some well-placed investments.
Considering the new opportunities that ICT innovations bring to improve performance of financial and extension services, this study looks at the potential contribution of financial and extension services to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The approach used extends the standard Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model to include longer-term management goals and find a solution that balances the efficient use of innovation investments and the achievement of policy goals, making this approach well suited for the analysis of the SDGs.
Feeding the world’s steadily growing population while respecting the planetary boundaries will be a key challenge for humanity in the future. Prevailing production and consumption patterns are leading to a loss of natural resources and destroying ecosystems and their functions. More than 820 million people were affected by malnutrition in 2017. Climate change is exacerbating this development and pushing natural ecosystems to their limits, something that is having far-reaching consequences for the environment, the economy and humanity.
Rainfed agriculture accounts for more than half of the world’s food production but is facing increasing precipitation variability, driven by climate change. Achieving zero hunger will require improvements in rainwater management to increase productivity. About 45 percent of global rainfed cropland is still under low-input production systems. These are concentrated mostly in lower-income countries, which face multiple challenges in addressing the growing water shortages. Improved water management practices must be combined with the best agronomic practices for enhanced effectiveness.
This brief explores the evidence on the relationships between food aid transfers and investments in climate adaptive agriculture using data from Ethiopia, Malawi and United Republic of Tanzania. Four climate adaptive agricultural investments are considered, namely: adoption of cereal-legume intercropping, use of organic fertilizers such as manure and compost, construction of soil and water conservation structures in fields, and investments in livestock diversification.