The Sourcebook is the outcome of joint planning, continued interest in gender and agriculture, and concerted efforts by the World Bank, FAO, and IFAD. The purpose of the Sourcebook is to act as a guide for practitioners and technical staff inaddressing gender issues and integrating gender-responsive actions in the design and implementation of agricultural projects and programs. It speaks not with gender specialists on how to improve their skills but rather reaches out to technical experts to guide them in thinking through how to integrate gender dimensions into their operations.
In Nepal, the Plantwise programme, in collaboration with International Development Enterprises (iDE), has established networks of locally owned plant clinics, run by community business facilitators (CBFs) trained as plant doctors, who provide practical plant health advice. This study examines how gender is integrated into this programme in three purposively selected study districts. It presents the experiences of farmers, the challenges they faced in accessing plant health services through a gender and social inclusion lens.
Gender integration focuses on applying a gender lens to look at how social relations of gender and underlying power dynamics affect men’s and women’s participation in and benefit from development programmes. In Plantwise, gender mainstreaming aimed to (1) understand gender relations and how they affected access to agricultural advisory services and adoption of plant health management practices, and (2) remove gender related barriers to access and adoption and improve gender equity.
The invasive pest, fall armyworm (FAW) was confirmed to be in Ghana in 2016. Stakeholders, including CABI, worked to support the development of a national FAW management plan. A review of the management plan implementation was undertaken using outcome harvesting, a Sprockler inquiry and key informant interviews. Results showed evidence of stakeholder collaboration, leading to increased public awareness of FAW and related management practices, and more coordinated research into low-risk management options.
This paper comparatively analyzes the structure of agricultural policy development networks that connect organizations working on agricultural development, climate change and food security in fourteen smallholder farming communities across East Africa, West Africa and South Asia.
In the context of an exponential rise in access to information in the last two decades, this special issue explores when and how information might be harnessed to improve governance and public service delivery in rural areas. Information is a critical component of government and citizens’ decision-making; therefore, improvements in its availability and reliability stand to benefit many dimensions of governance, including service delivery.
Over the past few decades, some countries in Asia have been more successful than others in addressing poverty and malnutrition. The key question is what policies, strategies, legislation and institutional arrangements have led to a transformed agricultural sector, effectively contributing to poverty alleviation and addressing malnutrition. The great majority of national policymakers within and outside the Asia-Pacific region are keen to understand the causes of agricultural development and transformation in successful countries in Asia.
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 purposes of this course are to review the major reforms being considered internationally that aim to change the policy and institutional structure and operations of public sector agricultural extension systems, and to examine the advantages and disadvantages of each of these reforms as illustrated by the selected case studies. Aside from the introductory chapter, the course is organized into nine modules, which are conceived as part of a larger framework.
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’.