Learning from Public Research-Private Sector Partnerships in ARISA

The Applied Research and Innovation Systems in Agriculture project (ARISA) started in December 2014 with the aim of increasing net farm income for 10,000 smallholder farming households in eastern Indonesia. The project was designed to address a key challenge in agricultural research for development: how to ensure that proven research outputs1 are available and accessible for use in farming communities. One strategy to overcome this challenge is for research institutes (RIs) and the private sector (PS) to form partnerships and work together to solve technical and institutional challenges to support effective and sustainable rural development. This approach complemented AIP-Rural’s2 over-arching design, which is to engage with the private sector, and use a market systems development pathway to improve the livelihoods of smallholder farming households in eastern Indonesia. At the same time, ARISA designed research activities to support improved understanding of RI-PS partnerships and derive broader lessons for those undertaking similar programs.Using a partnership-based approach, ARISA established eight interventions in East Java which sought to stimulate innovation and support the livelihoods of poor farming households in the region. Partnerships were designed to bring together researchers who had worked on approaches to improving agricultural production with private sector partners, and with an interest in supporting farmers to gain access to this information, while addressing broader systemic barriers and constraints to sustainable change. This report focuses on five RI-PS partnerships. Each partnership was identified through an expression of interest or brokering process, and received modest financial and capacity building support from ARISA to address key production and processing challenges