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.

In order to facilitate Participatory Technology Development (PTD) in African agriculture, extensionists and scientists must collaborate with local innovators to optimise (where necessary) and disseminate their innovations. This literature review proposes a conceptual model for PTD in which technology is developed in the context of an adoption cycle. Building on an innovation-decision approach, the characteristics of innovations that achieve widespread uptake are identified.

The aim of this study was to explore the interactions that exist among agricultural stakeholders in the southwestern highlands of Uganda as a way of identifying opportunities and gaps for operation of Innovation Platforms (IPs) under the proof of concept of Integrated Agricultural Research for Development (IAR4D) research project.

Innovation system approach offers an holistic, multidisciplinary and comprehensive framework for analyzing innovation process, the roles of science and technology actors and their interactions, emphazing on wider stakeholder participation, linkages and institutional context of innovation and processes. This paper was aimed to: 1. review the concept of innovation system; 2. appraise the application to agriculture and its relevance and 3. analyze the policy implications for agricultural extension delivery in Nigeria.

This brief discusses the benefits of innovation platforms in dealing with natural resource management issues.

This brief is part of the series of ‘practice briefs’ intended to help guide agricultural research practitioners who seek to support and implement innovation platforms. A contribution to the CGIAR Humidtropics research program, the development of the briefs was led by the International Livestock Research Institute; they draw on experiences of the CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food, several CGIAR centres and partner organizations.

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.

A challenge for researchers and other developers of new technologies in agriculture is to find ways of communicating their results and recommendations. This challenge is particularly acute in regions in which farmers have limited access to education and where illiteracy is widespread, such as in the rural areas of Mali. One approach that shows potential, yet remains largely unused by extension services, is the dissemination of educational video on mobile phones with video and Bluetooth technology, which are widespread in the region.

This paper takes the viewpoint of a social scientist and looks at agricultural scientists' pathways for science impact. Awareness of these pathways is increasingly becoming part and parcel of the professionalism of the agricultural scientist, now that the pressure is on to mobilize smallholders and their productive resources for (global) food security and for reducing persistent rural poverty. Significant new thinking about pathways is emerging and it is useful to present some of this, even if it is not cut-and-dried.

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.