This article addresses the impact of Integrated Agricultural Research for Development (IAR4D) on food security among smallholder farmers in three countries of southern Africa (Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Malawi). Southern Africa has suffered continued hunger despite a myriad of technological interventions that have been introduced in agriculture to address issues of food security, as well as poverty alleviation.
As the PAEPARD project is complex and multi-faceted, ensuring that appropriate information is made available to users in a timely manner and in a form that can be easily understood and used has been a major challenge.
This paper argues that Dutch-funded capacity development projects in developing countries for tertiary agricultural education organisations as they are currently carried out are not able to successfully achieve the sustained changes required. That is, changes in how an organisation functions, its cultural norms and rules, and also in how it interacts within wider networks. Rather, long-term institutional change is needed.
In recent years the there has been an increasing recognition of the potential of the innovation systems concept to provide new ways of making more effective use of agricultural research and improve its impact on socially desirable outcomes. This paper documents the experiences of a group of researchers in India who experimented with this framework and tried to operationalise its principles in project design. The paper comments on some of the implications of using this approach and the challenges it presents for implementers of agricultural research projects in developing countries.
This paper traces the evolution of the innovation systems framework within the agricultural sector in Sub-Saharan Africa, and presents a conceptual framework for agricultural innovation systems. The difference between innovation ecology/ecosystems and intervention-based innovations systems is highlighted, given that these two concepts are used at different levels in promoting and sustaining agricultural innovations.
This is the first chapter of the book "Innovation platforms for agricultural development: Evaluating the mature innovation platforms landscape". It introduces the background, case study competition process, case study characterization and readers’ guide, and book outline. Characterization of the case studies includes their geographical spread, age and life stage of the platforms, and specific information on the multi-stakeholder processes, the content matter, platform support functions, and outcomes and impacts.
Innovation platforms are by nature democratic spaces for joint problem identification, analysis, prioritization, and the collective design and implementation of activities to overcome problems. They are part of agricultural systems, and only a very small number of the stakeholders will be represented in the innovation platforms. This article sustainability and sucess criterea ofinnovation platforms
The question of how agricultural research can best be used for developmental purposes is a topic of some debate in developmental circles. The idea that this is simply a question of better transfer of ideas from research to farmers has been largely discredited. Agricultural innovation is a process that takes a multitude of different forms, and, within this process, agricultural research and expertise are mobilised at different points in time for different purposes. This paper uses two key analytical principles in order to find how research is actually put into use.
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.
Increasingly, (inter)national development organisations are investing in programmes for youth in agribusiness throughout Africa.