In Sub-Saharan Africa, the rapidly evolving COVID-19, increasing population growth, and exponential expansion in demand for agricultural commodities are putting pressure on available resources, thereby posing immense challenges to the region’s capacity to achieve nutritional security related to United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Zimbabwe has a pluralistic agricultural extension system. In addition to the public extension service, donors contract private service providers to deliver extension services in specific project areas. This study assesses the impact of an outsourced extension service on rural households in the Mutasa district of Zimbabwe’s Manicaland Province, and examines the financial cost and benefit of this service. The extension service was delivered by a local agribusiness firm and funded by USAID. The study analyses survey data gathered from 94 client and 90 non-client rural households.
These advanced training materials have been produced to foster the capacity of practitioners from private, nongovernmental and public sectors on one hand, and academics and scientists on the other, to practically implement cost-efficient RWHI technologies and practices in arid and semi-arid areas. Therefore, these training materials intend to provide the required information to support proper planning, design and construction of cost-efficient RWHI technologies and practices, with special emphasis on the specific problems encountered in Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique and Zimbabwe.
This article addresses the impact of Integrated Agricultural Research for Development (IAR4D) on food security among smallholder farmers in three countries of southern Africa (Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Malawi). Southern Africa has suffered continued hunger despite a myriad of technological interventions that have been introduced in agriculture to address issues of food security, as well as poverty alleviation.
This paper asks: What have been the impacts of farmer- or community-led (informal) processes of research and development in agriculture and natural resource management in terms of food security, ecological sustainability, economic empowerment, gender relations, local capacity to innovate and influence on formal agricultural research and development institutions?
The 2021 Global Report on Food Crises (GRFC 2021) highlights the remarkably high severity and numbers of people in Crisis or worse (IPC/CH Phase 3 or above) or equivalent in 55 countries/territories, driven by persistent conflict, pre-existing and COVID-19-related economic shocks, and weather extremes. The number identified in the 2021 edition is the highest in the report’s five-year existence. The report is produced by the Global Network against Food Crises (which includes WFP), an international alliance working to address the root causes of extreme hunger.
Inclusive innovation is the means by which new goods and services are developed for and/or by the billions living on lowest incomes. Although a topic of increasing interest, it has been relatively under-researched and under-conceptualised to date. This article studies arguably the most successful new technology to reach low-income groups: the mobile phone, focusing specifically on its diffusion in Kenya. Systems of innovation are shown to be an appropriate frame for conceptualisation of inclusive innovation.
Scaling represents successful diffusion that ensures sizeable impact and earnings from information and communication technology (ICT) innovations in emerging markets. Practice can still be shaped by dualistic views-innovation vs diffusion, pilot vs scale-up, lead firm vs other actors, technical vs social. Synthesising the literature that challenges these dualities, this paper creates a systemic perspective that is particularly appropriate for scaling of ICT to bottom-of-the-pyramid (BoP) markets.
This paper draws lessons from selected country experiences of adaptation and innovation in pursuit of food security goals.
Over the years, CTA has contributed to building ACP capacity to understand innovation processes, strengthen the agricultural innovation system and embed innovation thinking in agricultural and rural development strategies. The CTA Top 20 Innovations project set out to prove that innovation is taking place in ACP agriculture and in the process has demonstrated that smallholder farmers are beneficiaries as well as partners in agricultural innovation.