Following the food price crisis in 2008, African governments implemented policies aiming at crowding in investment in rice value chain upgrading to help domestic rice compete with imports. This study assess the state of rice value chain upgrading in West Africa by reviewing evidence on rice millers’ investment in semi-industrial and industrial milling technologies, contract farming and vertical integration during the post-crisis period 2009–2019. We find that upgrading is more dynamic in countries with high rice production and import bills and limited comparative advantage in demand.
In the context of an exponential rise in access to information in the last two decades, this special issue explores when and how information might be harnessed to improve governance and public service delivery in rural areas. Information is a critical component of government and citizens’ decision-making; therefore, improvements in its availability and reliability stand to benefit many dimensions of governance, including service delivery.
Understanding how an innovation system emerges and develops is critical to its promotion and to ensuring successful innovation processes. Unfortunately, research on innovation system approaches has neglected the interplay between innovation and entrepreneurship and overlooked focus on how innovation systems occur. Based on a unique framework integrating the innovation systems concept and entrepreneurship theory, this study uncovers a process of innovation system formation: a self-organizing system of innovation based on a promising technology: the New Rice for Africa (NERICA).
Fall Armyworm (Spodoptera frugiperda), or FAW, is an insect native to tropical and subtropical regions of the Americas. In the absence of natural controls or good management, it can cause significant damage to crops. It prefers maize, although it can feed on more than 80 additional species of crops including rice, sorghum, millet, sugarcane, vegetable crops and cotton.
The concept of an innovation platform is increasingly used in interventions inspired by agricultural innovation systems thinking, as a way of bringing stakeholders from a sector together to enable transformative change. An essential role on such innovation platforms is thought to be that of the ‘innovation champion’, but this role has so far not been unravelled.
L’étude a contribué à améliorer la chaîne de valeur (CVA) maïs grain blanc grâce à des liens et relations plus structurés entre ses acteurs. L’Approche Recherche Intégrée pour le Développement a été utilisée à travers le suivi strict de toutes ses étapes pour installer une plateforme d’innovations dans la commune de Matéri et promouvoir les relations inter-acteurs. Les résultats de l’application de l’approche multi-acteurs ont fait ressortir le maïs grain blanc comme chaîne de valeur prioritaire dans la zone d’étude.
Les plateformes d’innovation (PI) sont perçues aujourd’hui comme les approches les plus adéquates de développement et de promotion des innovations agricoles. Mais la plupart des précédentes études se sont focalisées à la description des résultats obtenus sans approfondir les facteurs sous-tendant ces résultats.
La plateforme d’innovation (PI) est une approche multi-acteurs pour des solutions aux problèmes complexes. Elle est d’actualité en Afrique Subsaharienne confrontée à de nombreux défis agricoles. Cette étude utilise une perspective systémique pour comprendre le processus de génération et de diffusion d’innovation relative à la post-récolte du riz local au Bénin. La collecte des données quantitatives et qualitatives a été faite avec des questionnaire et guides d’entretien auprès de 300 femmes étuveuses de riz, membres de la PI à Malanville, et sélectionnées de façon aléatoire et stratifiée.
Women play important roles at different nodes of both agricultural and off-farm value chains, but in many countries their contributions are either underestimated or limited by prevailing societal norms or gender-specific barriers. We use primary data collected in Asia (Bangladesh, Philippines) and Africa (Benin, Malawi) to examine the relationships between women’s empowerment, gender equality, and participation in a variety of local agricultural value chains that comprise the food system.
This paper discusses external influences on innovation platforms (IPs) and the options for effective responses. The platforms examined in this paper were conceived as vehicles for facilitating institutional change in support of innovation that benefits smallholders, in selected agro-enterprise domains in Benin, Ghana and Mali. They were designed and implemented in a manner that enabled experimentation with processes of change in the selected domains.