Given the increasing tension between food production and food demand in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as the poor development of the rice sector in Africa, the present paper examines the impact of agricultural extension on adoption of chemical fertilizers and their impact on rice productivity in Ghana. A parametric approach was employed to account for selectivity and endogeneity effects, which most impact studies fail to address. The empirical results reveal that agricultural extension service is endogenous in the chemical fertilizer adoption specification

To successfully realize the African transformation agenda, governments will have to capitalize on the potential of Africa’s youth. Growing up in an increasingly free and fair continent, the young people of Africa are dynamic, forward-looking and best positioned to find innovative solutions to local chal-lenges through the use of science and technology. To do this, conditions have to be suitable and young people need an environment in which barriers to self-actualization are broken.

Rapid climatic and socio-economic changes challenge current agricultural R&D capacity. The necessary quantum leap in knowledge generation should build on the innovation capacity of farmers themselves. A novel citizen science methodology, triadic comparisons of technologies or tricot, was implemented in pilot studies in India, East Africa, and Central America. The methodology involves distributing a pool of agricultural technologies in different combinations of three to individual farmers who observe these technologies under farm conditions and compare their performance.

A decline in public sector extension services in developing countries has led to an increasing emphasis on alternative extension approaches that are participatory, demand-driven, client-oriented, and farmer centered. One such approach is the volunteer farmer-trainer (VFT) approach, a form of farmer-to-farmer extension where VFTs host demonstration plots and share information on improved agricultural practices within their community. VFTs are trained by extension staff and they in turn train other farmers.

There is a broad consensus that farmers are not simply recipients of promoted techniques: rather, they are also an important source of agricultural innovations. They invent farm tools and equipment, develop new crop varieties, and add value to externally promoted technologies. When scouting, documenting and promoting such farmer-generated innovations, the thorny issue of intellectual property rights (IPRs) often emerges.

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?

It has long been recognized that investment is needed to build capacity in Science Technology and Innovation (STI) particularly in low and medium income (LMI) countries. Yet there is little understanding as to how to do this.

The study explored the nature of innovation response capacity and the building of policy-relevant innovation capacity in the context of livestock-related emergencies in East Africa.

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.