This book is about the challenges and practical realities of building the capacity to innovate. It describes the experiences of the Research Into Use (RIU) programme, a five-year, multi-country investment by DFID that aimed to extract development impact from past investments in agricultural research. Specifically, it explores different approaches through which innovation capacities were built. One approach was to establish and support innovation platforms (IPs) – an approach increasingly advocated as a way to broker linkages and facilitate interaction between multiple stakeholders in order to enable agricultural innovation. Originally, IPs were intended to help put existing research findings into use for developmental purposes in Africa. The purpose of this book is to describe lessons from these experiences for practitioners and policy-makers in the national and international arenas who are planning and implementing investments to enable agricultural innovation.
This book documents a study on the concept of Integrated Agricultural Research for Development (IAR4D) that was developed by the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA). The IAR4D concept forms the basis for the Sub-Saharan Africa Challenge Programme (SSA...
This short note discusses the innovation platforms in their potential functions and benefits, with references to southern Africa countries. The initial consideration is that, although appropriate technologies and farming strategies to increase production in small-scale crop-livestock systems exist, farmers often...
In this book, West African research associates from the CoS-SIS programme describe how they initiated innovation platforms and facilitated the different steps in a CIG cycle. The stories show that the facilitation of innovation platforms is not easy: it requires...
Innovation platforms are groups of individuals or stakeholder representatives with different backgrounds and interests. They come together to diagnose problems, identify opportunities, and find ways to achieve their goals. When innovation platforms are set up by development projects, their processes...
Within the last four years, a number of high profile reports outlining new strategies for pulling African agriculture out of its current impasse have emerged. These include the Comprehensive African Agriculture Development Programme of NEPAD, and the InterAcademy Council Report...