Rural Advisory Services (RAS) are increasingly recognised as critical to agricultural and rural development. They provide rural communities with wide range of skills and knowledge and facilitate their interactions among the different actors to help them access support and services required for improving their livelihoods. Family Farmers are one of the important clients of RAS as they are the most predominant type of farmers worldwide.
As the name suggests, the original aim of the Rural Knowledge Network (RKN) was to make more information available specifically about markets, to smallholder farmers. The core idea was to provide information to farmers and traders about current market prices in different markets around the country. This was done by building a network of entrepreneurs who regularly collected the price information and sent it to a central collecting Internet platform facility.
This report provides a synthesis of all findings and information generated through a “stocktaking” process that involved a desk study of Prolinnova documents and evaluation reports, a questionnaire to 40 staff members of international organizations in agricultural research and development (ARD), self-assessment by the Country Platforms (CPs) and backstopping visits to five CPs. In 2014, the Prolinnova network saw a need to re-strategise in a changing context, and started this process by reviewing the activities it had undertaken and assessing its own functioning.
The project “Strengthening Community Resilience to Change: Combining Local Innovative Capacity with Scientific Research” (CLIC–SR), supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, was completed on 31 August 2016. During the four years since 2012, the Prolinnova Country Platforms in Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda made large strides in:
The CLIC–SR project started on 1 September 2012, ended on 31 August 2016, and was implemented in four countries: Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. This report covers the work done in the final project period: January–August 2016. The report adds a chapter that reviews the achievements of the project over the full project cycle. The report from an independent external evaluation was a major source of information for this final chapter.
This publication provides a collection of papers, commentaries, expert opinions and reflections on state-of-the-art innovation systems thinking and approaches in agriculture. It is the direct output of a CTA and WUR/CoS-SIS collaboration which had its genesis in an expert consultation on ‘Innovation Systems: Towards Effective Strategies in support of Smallholder Farmers’.
In this book, the authors assessed the role of biotechnology innovation for sustainable development in emerging and developing economies. This book compiles studies that each illustrate the potential, demonstrated value and challenges of biotechnology applications for sustainable agricultural innovation and/or industrial development in a national, regional and international context.
This report is part of the AFRHINET project under the ACP-EU Cooperation Programme in Science and Technology (S&T II). The overall aims of the project are to enhance options for sustainable integration of rainwater harvesting for irrigation through understanding adoption constraints and developing networks for capacity building and technology transfer. The African partners are Addis Ababa University and WaterAid-Ethiopia in Ethiopia, University of Nairobi and ICRAF-Searnet in Kenya, Eduardo Mondlane University in Mozambique, and University of Zimbabwe and ICRISAT-Zimbabwe in Zimbabwe.
The Scaling Agricultural Innovations Workshop gathered scaling experts from a range of organizations and agriculture sectors to share their experiences and ideas on the findings and lessons learned from five case studies (hybrid maize in Zambia, irrigated rice in Senegal, Purdue Improved Crop Storage bags in Kenya, agricultural machinery services in Bangladesh, and Kuroiler chickens in Uganda).
The report introduces 30 young innovators, 21 featured with full stories, and nine other "innovators to watch". They come from countries including Barbados, Botswana, Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, Jamaica, Senegal, Tanzania. The publication presents a multidimensional picture of the emerging field of ICT entrepreneurship in agriculture in developing countries. It describes challenges but also successes already achieved. It contains advice for aspiring agtech entrepreneurs as well as recommendations from youth on how to support their ventures.