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.
This paper presents the processes, general guidelines lessons and experiences pertaining to “good practices” for organizing and forming Agricultural Innovation Platforms in the Lake Kivu Pilot Learning Site, covering three countries (Uganda, Rwanda and Democratic Republic of Congo) with widely differing social political environments to address agricultural development challenges.
This paper examines how the different institutional innovations arising from various permutations of linkages and interactions of ARD organizations (national, international advanced agricultural research centres and universities) influenced the different outcomes in addressing identified ARD problems.
The central question in increasing productivity and generating incomes in African agriculture is how to move from technology generation to innovations that respond to constraints of agricultural production along the value chains. This question was considered in the context of subsistence agriculture, smallholder production systems, inefficient marketing and investments by the private sector, a preponderance of public interventions, and inadequate policies.