Over the last 10 years much has been written about the role of the private sector as part of a more widely-conceived notion of agricultural sector capacity for innovation and development. This paper discusses the emergence of a new class of private enterprise in East Africa that would seem to have an important role in efforts to tackle poverty reduction and food security. These organisations appear to occupy a niche that sits between mainstream for-profit enterprises and the developmental activities of government programmes, NGOs and development projects.
RIU is a research and development programme designed to put agricultural research into use for developmental purposes and to conduct research on how to do this. The programme is funded by the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID). It follows earlier investments by DFID in agricultural and natural resources research, supported through its renewable natural resources research strategy (RRNRRS). While this strategy delivered high-quality research, the uptake of this research and its impact on social and economic progress was modest.
This presentation argues the need of green growth in agriculture, analyzes features of the innovation systems and ends with some policies practices. The presentation has been prepared for "Innovation and Modernising the Rural Economy", OECD’s 8th Rural Development Policy Conference, 3-5 October 2012 (Krasnoyarsk, Russian Federation).
LenCD has prepared a joint statement on results and capacity development (presented in this publication), which stresses that meaningful, sustainable results are premised on proper investments in capacity development and that these results materialize at different levels and at different times, along countries’ development trajectory. To provide evidence in support of this statement, LenCD launched a call for submission of stories.
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 book represents the proceedings of the FAO international technical conference dedicated to Agricultural Biotechnologies in Developing Countries (ABDC-10) that took place in Guadalajara, Mexico on 1-4 March 2010. A major objective of the conference was to take stock of the application of biotechnologies across the different food and agricultural sectors in developing countries, in order to learn from the past and to identify options for the future to face the challenges of food insecurity, climate change and natural resource degradation.
IFPRI’s flagship report reviews the major food policy issues, developments, and decisions of 2016, and highlights challenges and opportunities for 2017 at the global and regional levels. This year’s report looks at the impact of rapid urban growth on food security and nutrition, and considers how food systems can be reshaped to benefit both urban and rural populations. Drawing on recent research, IFPRI researchers and other distinguished food policy experts consider a range of timely questions:
■ What do we know about the impacts of urbanization on hunger and nutrition?
The Worldwide Extension Study provides empirical data on the human and financial resources of agricultural extension and advisory systems worldwide, as well as other important information on: the primary extension service providers in each country (e.g.: public, private and/or non-governmental); which types and groups of farmers are the primary target groups (e.g.: large, medium, and/or small-scale farmers, including rural women) for each extension organization; how each organization’s resources are allocated to key extension and advisory service functions; each organization’s information a
This paper aims to map the experience of the RIU Asia projects and draw out the main innovation management tactics being observed while laying the groundwork for further research on this topic. It provides a framework to help analyse the sorts of innovation management tasks that are becoming important. This framework distinguishes four elements of innovation management: (i) Functions (ii) Actions (iii) Tools and (iv) Organisational Format.
This paper briefly reviews three conceptual frameworks: namely, the national agricultural research system (NARS), the agricultural knowledge and information system (AKIS) and the agricultural innovation system (AIS) concepts. Next, the paper reviews the definition of ‘innovation’ and proposes that agricultural innovation can occur at four different but interlinked domains.