This paper identifies market failures that limit agricultural R&D for Africa and other resource-poor environments, and proposes a way to complement existing institutions with cash prizes for the dissemination of successful new technologies adopted by low-income farmers. The proposed prize institution would use agronomic experiments and farm surveys to document the value of innovations after their initial diffusion, and offer payments in proportion to estimated social benefits in target regions.
The Agribusiness and Market Development (AMDe) project is funded through USAID Ethiopia’s Feed the Future program from June 2011 to May 2016. It goal is to sustainably reduce poverty and hunger by improving the productivity and competiveness of agricultural value chains that offer jobs and income activities for rural households.
This report details the results of the Mid-Term Evaluation (MTE) of the Sustainable Nutrition and Agriculture Promotion (SNAP) program in Sierra Leone. This is a five-year USAID Food for Peace (FFP) Multi-Year Assistance Program. The overall goal of SNAP is to reduce food insecurity and increase resiliency among the most food insecure and vulnerable rural populations.
This assessment has been conducted over December 2015 to May 2016 under the Powering Agriculture Support Task Order (PASTO). PASTO is funded by USAID and implemented by Tetra Tech ES, Inc. PASTO provides support services to the Powering Agriculture: An Energy Grand Challenge for Development (PAEGC) and its Founding Partners to enable their effective management, monitoring and evaluation of the program.
To ensure that Feed the Future impact evaluations are well-conceived, build on existing evidence, and fill critical evidence gaps, the Bureau for Food Security of USAID is supporting a comprehensive assessment of existing evidence and gaps in knowledge for each of six themes covered by the Feed the Future Learning Agenda. This paper summarizes available evidence that relates to key questions for the Feed the Future Learning Agenda theme on improved gender integration and women’s empowerment.
The Women’s Leadership Program in Paraguay is a three-year (2012-2015) higher education partnership between the National University of Asuncion’s School of Agricultural Sciences in Paraguay and the University of Florida (UF) in the United States.The program supports national and local development goals in Paraguay that promote gender equality and female empowerment in the agricultural sector.
Feed the Future Asia Innovative Farmers Activity (AIFA) is a regional project working to facilitate the scaling of critical agricultural technologies through regional partnership and technology transfer. The project works with a range of agricultural technology stakeholders on a regional basis (private sector, research institutions, governments, networks, etc.) to increase food security, reduce poverty, and improve environmental sustainability by facilitating agricultural innovation and technology diffusion in the Asia region.
The agricultural innovation system can be strengthened by increasing the learning capacity of research and field organisations. Participatory methods were developed to study three dimensions of the capacity of such organisations in Nicaragua to access and analyse information, highly correlated to learning capacity – the individual routines of their professionals, the formal procedures of the organisation and the organisation's use of collaborative projects to strengthen core operations.
This paper discusses the challenges and determinants of agro-operations and innovation initiatives in developing countries. With particular reference to the Caribbean region, available country statistics and data are analysed. A generic model of collaborative innovation for agriculture that stresses collaboration among the stakeholders (government, knowledge institutions, public and private firms and others) is described.
Public–private partnerships that aim at the development of innovations have gained increasing attention from governments, public research and private companies, because they enable partners to draw from complementary resources and profit from synergy and joint learning. This article develops arguments for when partnerships should form and compares them with experiences in real partnership cases in Latin America.