The Farmer Field School (FFS) approach has been very successful and witnessed a strong expansion in many areas beyond crop production. Notwithstanding this success, the adoption of FFS in national extension often remains problematic and FFS activities have often been implemented in the margin of national institutions with strong reliance on donor funding. The creation of an enabling environment for institutional support is essential for expanding the effort, improving quality, and strengthening impact and continuity of the FFSs.
Every year, farmers in sub-Saharan Africa suffer from unacceptable levels of crop loss as a result of plant health problems, threatening their food security, income and livelihoods. This working paper shares lessons from Plantwise, an initiative to improve smallholder farmers’ access to plant health services in Uganda so that they can improve their yields, increase their incomes and improve their food security and livelihoods. The working paper presents lessons from almost ten years of experiences in implementing plant clinics in Uganda.
The main goal of the study is to quantify the effects of a) change in nitrogen fertilization rate, b) adjustment of sowing date, c) implementation of new cultivars, and d) supplementary irrigation on maize cropping systems across six African countries including Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Malawi, Ethiopia and Burkina Faso. For this purpose, 30 years (1980-2010) of climate data are used as well as soil and management information obtained from global datasets at 0.5° x 0.5° spatial resolution.
This paper, part of the Social Sciences Working Paper Series, presents studies undertaken by nine community-based, natural resource management (CBNRM)-oriented organizations in China, Viet Nam, the Philippines and Mongolia. The partner organizations, representing three broad types: academic, regional network, and community based, were brought together by a 2006 initiative in an informal network to develop and pilot methods for evaluating capacity development in community-based natural resource management.
The aim of this report is to provide a detailed review of documented social learning processes for climate changeand natural resource managementas described in peer-reviewed literature. Particular focus is on identifying (1) lessons and principles, (2) tools and approaches, (3) evaluation of social learning, as well as (4) concrete examples of impacts that social learning has contributed to.
This note offers a conceptual framework for dealing with 1) institutional and capacity assessment; and 2) capacity development issues, mainly in the public sector areas. This framework will be particularly useful in the in the preparation of support to sector programmes and budget support exercises.
The USAID Bureau for Food Security (BFS) has made available this Technical Brief on USAID role in Supporting National Agricultural Research Systems. USAID has launched its Feed the Future (FTF) program, which aims to address the root causes of hunger and poverty and which recognizes the importance of agricultural research as a critical (although not sufficient) input towards the solution in the longer term. Moreover, it is an input that has been relatively under exploited.
Capacity development is regarded by CGIAR as an effective vehicle for sustainable development, when embedded within broader CGIAR Research Programs (CRP). This document offers guidelines on how CGIAR and boundary partners (or those partners who take up and adapt research results for the next level of users) can successfully develop and implement strategies which support this process of integration.
This paper is the result of a joint effort of OECD/DAC and LenCD to assemble the critical messages about training and learning that are emerging from the current international scrutiny of training and capacity development. It synthesises current wisdom on the topic, and offers a sense of direction on where the debate is going, particularly in terms of approaches to capacity development interventions at country and field levels. The paper is written primarily for the demand side, i.e.
This paper captures lessons from recent experiences on using ‘theories of change’ amongst organisations involved in the research–policy interface. The literature in this area highlights much of the complexity inherent in the policymaking process, as well as the challenges around finding meaningful ways to measure research uptake. As a tool, ‘theories of change’ offers much, but the paper argues that the very complexity and dynamism of the research-to-policy process means that any theory of change will be inadequate in this context.