The mergers of some of the world's largest agribusinesses have led to speculation about what sort of global citizens the new companies will become and whether vulnerable rural populations, especially smallholder men and women farmers, will be negatively impacted. As innovation leaders in the agriculture industry, these new companies will be expected to play key roles in finding solutions for major agricultural challenges facing the world today.
This paper builds on experiences from the Research Into Use programme in South Asia that tried to up-scale promising research outputs into wider use. The experience suggests that while facilitating access to technology is important in putting research into use, it has value only when it is bundled together with other innovation-management tasks such as: developing networks, organising producers, communicating research needs, mediating conflicts, facilitating access to inputs and output services, convening innovation platforms, and advocating for policy change and other negotiated changes in
There is renewed attention on the importance of advisory services and extension in rural development processes. This paper, based on the publication ‘Mobilizing the potential of rural and agricultural extension', focuses on five opportunities to mobilise the potential of extension and advisory services. The five areas are: (1) focusing on best-fit approaches; (2) embracing pluralism; (3) using participatory approaches; (4) developing capacity; and (5) ensuring long-term institutional support.
As the name suggests, the original aim of the Rural Knowledge Network (RKN) was to make more information available specifically about markets, to smallholder farmers. The core idea was to provide information to farmers and traders about current market prices in different markets around the country. This was done by building a network of entrepreneurs who regularly collected the price information and sent it to a central collecting Internet platform facility.
Public-private partnerships are a new way of carrying out research and development (R&D) in Latin America's agricultural sector. These partnerships spur innovation for agricultural development and have various advantages over other institutional arrangements fostering R&D. This report summarizes the experiences of a research project that analyzed 125 public-private research partnerships (PPPs) in 12 Latin American countries. The analysis indicates that several types of partnerships have emerged in response to the various needs of the different partners.
The purpose of this report is to show how development issues and policy initiatives shaped the design and structure of the science, technology, and innovation (STI) capacity-building program that eventually emerged from the partnership between the Government of Rwanda and the World Bank.
The purpose of the study was to try and get a snapshot of broad patterns and trends, identify emerging issues that warrant further investigation and, more importantly, use these initial findings to start a wider discussion on business-led innovation and the SDGs, and the pathway for accelerating this.The survey was sent out to all members of Global Initiatives Responsible Business Forum (RBF) Network in November 2016.
Increasing on-farm production diversity and improving markets are recognized as ways to improve the dietary diversity of smallholders. Using instrumental variable methods to account for endogeneity, this paper studies the interplay of production diversity, markets and diets in the context of seasonality in Afghanistan. Accordingly to the authors improved crop diversity over the year is positively associated with dietary diversity in the regular season, but not in the lean season.
Este documento tiene por objeto promover el fortalecimiento de los/as pequeños/as productores/as en la dinamización de las cadenas agroalimentarias y así generar mayores impactos en la lucha contra la pobreza.
Le document de synthèse fournit une synthèse des concepts et des principes du cadre commun développé dans le cadre de la Plate-forme pour l'agriculture tropicale (TAP). L'objectif du Cadre Commun de la TAP est de promouvoir une meilleure cohérence et un impact plus fort du renforcement des capacités (RC) en soutien aux systèmes d'innovation agricole (AIS) sous les tropiques. Développé en 2015 à travers un processus hautement participatif, il a été convenu que le Cadre devrait fournir des bases conceptuelles et des indications pratiques.