This document is a brief description of the project "Pejeriz: Rice, entrepreneurship and jobs in West Africa". The project aims to building and strengthening entrepreneurial capacities of rural youth, creating market linkages and promoting value-adding activities for rural youth in the rice value chains of Mali and Senegal. The capacity-building efforts will develop a pool of young professionals with the competence and skills to engage in sustainable business along the rice value chain

This brochure describes the project MANIOC21: releasing  the potential of cassava. The aim is to fine-tune and accelerate innovative and new business models that create market linkages across cassava value chains and promote added-value activities to be scaled-up at the regional level

ICT-driven digital tools to support smallholder farmers are arguably inevitable for agricultural development, and they are gradually evolving with promising outlook. Yet, the development and delivery of these tools to target users are often fraught with non-trivial, and sometimes unanticipated, contextual realities that can make or mar their adoption and sustainability. This article unfolds the experiential learnings from a digital innovation project focusing on surveillance and control of a major banana disease in East Africa which is being piloted in Rwanda.

The process of knowledge brokering in the agricultural sector, where it is generally called agricultural extension, has been studied since the 1950s. While agricultural extension initially employed research push models, it gradually moved towards research pull and collaborative research models. The current agricultural innovation systems perspective goes beyond seeing research as the main input to change and innovation, and recognises that innovation emerges from the complex interactions among multiple actors and is about fostering combined technical, social and institutional change.