Women are the backbone of the development of rural and national economies. There is no tool of development that is more effective than the empowerment of the rural women. Nigerian rural women lack sufficient economic resources that will enable them to articulate their needs and interests and organize themselves with a view to developing the nation.
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 synthesis report presents the outputs of the workshop organised by CTA at its headquarters in Wageningen, The Netherlands, 15-17 July 2008. The outputs are presented in two main parts, each corresponding to one of the workshop objectives, and ends with a section on the way forward as suggested by the workshop participants. It also includes a first attempt to come to a consolidated generic framework on AIS performance indicators, based on the outputs of the different working groups.
This presentation on capacity development has been illustrated by Patrick Kalas (Capacity Development Officer at FAO) in occasion of the CTA & FAO Expert Workshop 22-23 October 2014 in Rome, Italy.
This paper describes the research path followed by a team of researchers who had investigated the nitrate problem in a case study area, and who became aware of the low impact of their data on the policy debate and on the practices that – as the research team saw it – had given rise to the problem in the first place. They embarked on a series of interactions first with participatory action researchers from the SLIM project (see Fig.
By referring to the developments of transition theories, this paper analyse the innovation pathways involving the wheat-bread value chain in Tuscany (Italy). The analysis sheds light on the relevance of the nature of social innovation carried out by grassroots initiatives in their pursuing radical change aimed at deeply redefining production-consumption practices through social interaction, to meet socially shared needs and achieving several social benefits.
A “farmers’ market” identifies a common area where farmers meet periodically to sell food products which do not need to be processed before consumption. Farmers’ markets have recently experienced steady growth mainly due to increasing demand for traditional foods and rising consumers’ interest towards locally produced food products. It is also the case that they provide transparency along the supply chain and decrease information asymmetries.
The new challenges facing the European agricultural and rural sectors call for a review of the links between knowledge production and its use to foster innovation, and for a deeper analysis of the potential of the current Agricultural Knowledge and Innovation Systems (AKIS) to react to the evolving context. This paper highlights how the Italian AKIS places itself in the new emerging framework, with a particular emphasis on the incentives guiding the system and the experiences of monitoring and evaluating the national AKIS policy.
According to the literature on regime tran-sition, niches are sources of innovation that may lead to the transformation of the dominant regime, if pro-cesses at other level of the system –the landscape and the mainstream regime -are supportive. A focus on actors involved in the transition process and the analysis of their specific role in knowledge networks can help assessing the robustness of a specific niche and its growth potential. Knowledge systems, and in particular the dynamics of local and expert knowledge, have in fact a key role in innovation mod-els.
The European Innovation Partnership for agricultural productivity and sustainability (EIP-AGRI), which can be perceived as a platform based on interaction among farmers, researchers, and advisors/extensionists, represents a useful tool for a better understanding of applied innovation processes.