Innovation platforms are groups of individuals or stakeholder representatives with different backgrounds and interests. They come together to diagnose problems, identify opportunities, and find ways to achieve their goals. When innovation platforms are set up by development projects, their processes are usually facilitated by the support organization.
This case study systematises the experiences of the ICCO Alliance in introducing a multi-stakeholder approach in all of its relations with partner organisations and in its development cooperation practice. Using Ken Wilber’s framework of institutional change, the author presents the internal as well as external influences that need to take place at the organisational level, the level of individual staff in these organisation as well as between organisations in the ICCO Alliance for the ICCO Alliance to be able to change.
The present article reviews the results and methodological design of an evaluation at higher education centres in Bolivia, Ghana and India. The ambition of these programmes was to integrate endogenous knowledge and values into education and research programmes. The evaluation provides an example of a mixed methods design that allowed for inclusion and appreciation of perspectives of different stakeholders. An evaluation team has to consider which set of methods is responding to the project context and how the methods complement each other and can be adapted to the case.
Explicitly integrating reflection in the learning process of multi-stakeholder processes (MSPs) increases the likelihood that purposeful change will occur. When reflectivity is made part of learning in MSPs, learning will become clearer and better articulated and it will contribute more strongly to purposeful change in a complex context. MSP facilitators should deliberately include reflective learning sessions and tools in the process design and implementation.
This paper (Part I) present a case study of work conducted by the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) to adapt network mapping techniques to a rural and developing country context. It reports on work in Colombia to develop a prototype network diagnosis tool for use by service providers who work to strengthen small rural groups. It is complemented by a further paper in this issue by Louise Clark (Part II) which presents work to develop a network diagnosis tool for stakeholders involved in agricultural supply chains in Bolivia.
African agriculture is currently at a crossroads, at which persistent food shortages are compounded by threats from climate change. But, as this book argues, Africa can feed itself in a generation and help contribute to global food security. To achieve this Africa has to define agriculture as a force in economic growth by: advancing scientific and technological research; investing in infrastructure; fostering higher technical training; and creating regional markets.
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’.
This presentation from the 2nd Triennial GFAR Conference, held in Senegal in 2003, presents InterSard and InterDev: two cases of partnerships for sharing information and knowledge on good practices and local innovation.
Background: Up to now, efforts to help local communities out of the food-insecurity trap were guided by researcher (or other actors)-led decisions on technologies to be implemented by the communities. This approach has proved inefficient because of low adoption of the so-called improved technologies. This paper describes the strategic approaches to the development of a climate-smart village (CSV) model in the groundnut basin of Senegal.
La production et la commercialisation de lait en Afrique de l’Ouest fait partie intégrante de l’économie et du mode de vie des familles d’éleveurs ruraux. La filière présente des potentiels de croissance certains avec un cheptel important, un secteur de la transformation dynamique et des débouchés en forte augmentation du fait de la croissance démographique et de l’urbanisation. Cette filière lait local est cependant aux prises à de nombreuses difficultés internes qui limitent fortement son développement.