This study reports on the contribution of farmer– to-farmer video-mediated group learning to capital assets building of women in resource-poor households. Data were collected using structured interviews with 140 randomly selected women in 28 video villages and 40 women in four control villages in north-west Bangladesh. Video-mediated group learning enhanced women’s ability to apply and experiment with seed technologies. It also stimulated reciprocal sharing of new knowledge and skills between them, other farmers and service providers.
The authors aimed at knowing how different learning methods, such as video shows and workshops, change farmers’ knowledge, attitudes and practices about botanical pesticides. This paper explains how video engages men and women farmers in spreading botanical pesticides across 12 villages in Bogra District, north-western Bangladesh.The authors conducted ex ante and ex post surveys among farmers from November 2009 to September 2010. For data analysis, the authors used t-test and McNemer and Wilcoxon sign rank tests.
In this paper, findings suggest that the uptake of social media is still in an early, exploratory phase associated with modest opportunities and relevant limitations of Web 2.0 mediated multi-stakeholder collaboration. Notably, there are gaps in giving and receiving feedback which are intrinsic to dyadic communication as well as innovation processes.
The Centre for Development Research (CDR), in collaboration with local partnership managed by the Bangladesh Agricultural University worked to establish a platform (i.e. a participatory rural video centre) that acts upon fostering rural women’s capacity for agricultural innovation in the north-west and north-east region of Bangladesh. In this paper, the authors elaborate principles of establishing the centre, and some evidences on Farmers’ Participatory Research (FPR) in the community.
In Bangladesh, strengthening agricultural innovation calls for facilitation of interactive communication and a wide range of mediation tasks within (and between) stakeholders operating in different social spheres. This paper examines how a public-sector agricultural extension agency has attempted to change its roles in implementing a major agricultural extension project in order to strengthen agricultural innovation.
The first phase in the development of the Common Framework on Capacity Development for Agricultural Innovation systems (CD for AIS) consisted of the review of the existing literature, building up a repository of relevant documentation on agricultural innovation in general and AIS and CD for AIS. This report summarizes this first phase. In particular, Section 1 covers this brief introduction. Sections two and three focus on the review of relevant literature, presenting the methodology used and the structure of the repository itself.
Growing empirical evidence suggests that innovation platforms can be effective in enhancing agricultural research impact by creating an enabling environment for scaling of innovations such as novel technologies, practices and busines models . However, efforts to understand how these innovation platforms operate to scale innovations are insufficient. Such knowledge is critical for improving the design of agricultural innovation systems, specifically within the context of a rising interest in the innovation platform approach to support the transformation of agriculture across Africa.
The paper documents the institutional logics of three case studies. The first case study focuses on farmer cooperatives and analyses the rules and routines enforced by new national legislation in replacement of traditional village associations. The argument behind this new arrangement was to better facilitate members’ access to agricultural inputs and services to enhance food production. The second case is about the institutional arrangement of seed systems in Mali. The new agricultural development framework includes a Seed Law aimed at facilitating farmers’ access to high quality seed.
Connecting science with policy has always been challenging for both scientists and policy makers. In Ghana, Mali and Senegal, multi-stakeholder national science-policy dialogue platforms on climate-smart agriculture (CSA) were setup to use scientificevidence to create awareness of climate change impacts on agriculture andadvocate for the mainstreaming of climate change and CSA into agriculturaldevelopment plans.
Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) is increasingly seen as a promising approach to feed the growing world population under climate change. The review explored how institutional perspectives are reflected in the CSA literature. In total, 137 publications were analyzed using institutional analysis framework, of which 55.5% make specific reference to institutional dimensions. While the CSA concept encompasses three pillars (productivity, adaptation, and mitigation), the literature has hardly addressed them in an integrated way.