The CGIAR Research Program on Integrated System for the Humid Tropics, or Humidtropics, works towards transforming the lives of the rural poor in several action sites in Asia, Africa and Tropical America. In doing so, different technologies and innovations were implemented and while at first the capacity development was going on almost intuitively, as an integrated part of the implementation process, it has soon become clear that such groundbreaking activities and ideas require a more organized and supervised approach.
The Agribusiness for Trade Competitiveness Project (ATC-P), branded as Katalyst, is a pioneer market systems development project contributing to sustainable poverty reduction in Bangladesh. It is implemented by Swisscontact under the umbrella of the Ministry of Commerce, Government of Bangladesh. The project has been operating in Bangladesh since 2003 in three phases.
Agricultural organizations are faced with continuous processes of change: economic openness, national and international competition between companies, adaptation to new business management models-Corporate Social Responsibility-, changing markets and the need to comply with regulations and certifications. This has led to the generation of a great demand for knowledge, preparation and motivation of the people who work in the organizations and in the agribusiness environment.
The Nile Basin Development Challenge (Nile BDC) is funded by the CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food (CPWF) to improve the resilience of rural livelihoods in the Ethiopian highlands through a landscape approach to rainwater management. The first project of the Program reviewed past research and development experiences with sustainable land and water management in Ethiopia. This brief summarizes key points from the study, which approached the subject from a broadly historical perspective, tracing changes in policies and strategies from the 1970s to the present.
La newsletter trae artículos a respecto del uso de las TIC en la Agricultura. Dentre ellos: Un futuro regional en construcción de Marcelo Bosch. Las TIC como herramienta para la superación de las asimetrías de Mônica Rodrigues. “El impacto de las TIC en la agricultura es enorme”, entrevista a Raúl Hopkins. Prioridades y políticas para el uso de las TIC en el sector agropecuario boliviano por Víctor Vásquez Mamani. “Poner las TIC al servicio de la administración y la gerencia retrasa su impacto en los clientes finales”, entrevista a Hugo Chavarría.
En la región centro-norte de Nicaragua, las organizaciones locales que trabajan con sistemas productivos de café, cacao y mixtos han unido esfuerzos bajo las Alianzas Territoriales de Aprendizaje impulsadas por CIAT, a través del Programa de Investigación de CGIAR sobre Sistemas Integrados del Trópico Húmedo (Humidtropics).
The Action Planning is a tool that formalizes commitments and plots the route to their implementation. An action plan is intended for the use of the core actors, who will have been identified beforehand in the visioning phase. It determines who does what and when, and is therefore essential to ensuring that things get done and that the goals and visions set out in the capacity development strategy are achieved.
This tool was designed to assess innovation capacities, identify strengths and weaknesses and monitor capacity changes over time. The scoring tool makes it clear which functional capacities are going to be needed to promote, lead or successfully participate in innovation processes. The tool evaluates capacities on the basis of 21 indicators (each of which is graded on a scale from 0 (low capacity) to 3 (high capacity), and build on the key innovation capacities identified in the capacity needs assessment.
Social Network Analysis is a practical and useful tool that looks at the linkages present in an innovation network and monitors their development over time. It maps the relationships between the stakeholders in the network and highlights the changes between them.
In the AgriSpin project (2015-2017) fifteen organisations involved in innovation support tried to understand better how each of them made a difference in helping farmers to innovate. In principle, each partner organisation hosted a Cross Visits of 3 – 4 days, to present a number of interesting innovation cases in which it was involved. The visiting team, composed of colleagues from other partner organisations, interviewed key actors in each case, and gave feedback about pearls, puzzlings and proposals in these innovation processes.