This brief explains the concept of gender equality in advisory services and discusses the opportunities that gender equality in rural advisory services can create for global and local food production, women’s economic empowerment, household food security, and nutrition. It summarises experiences of how gender equality can be pursued in advisory services and provides some practical examples.
Agricultural extension and advisory services (EAS) are often mentioned as a promising platform for the delivery of nutrition knowledge and practices, due to the close interaction that EAS agents have with farmers through their role as service providers in rural areas. Yet the context in which any nutrition knowledge is delivered by EAS agents, and the mechanisms for doing so, is unclear. The purpose of this study was to examine the integration of nutrition and agricultural EAS in Africa, South Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean.
This flyer is a GFRAS good practice note for extension and advisory service focused on Farmer Field Schools (FFS). It cover the following aspects: Philosophy and principles, Implementation, Capacity required, Costs, Strenghts and Weaknesses, Governance and Management, Potential Impact.
The paper defines and explains the concept of gender equality in advisory services and discusses the opportunities that gender equality in RAS would potentially create for global and local food production, women’s economic empowerment, household food security and nutrition as well as the challenges in achieving this.
This paper argues that Dutch-funded capacity development projects in developing countries for tertiary agricultural education organisations as they are currently carried out are not able to successfully achieve the sustained changes required. That is, changes in how an organisation functions, its cultural norms and rules, and also in how it interacts within wider networks. Rather, long-term institutional change is needed.
There is increasing policy, practice and academic interest in “inclusive innovation”. In simple terms, this is the means by which new goods and services are developed for and/or by those who have been excluded from the development mainstream; particularly the billions living on lowest incomes. However, there are many competing perspectives on inclusive innovation, which this paper resolves into an integrated ‘ladder’ model of different levels of inclusive innovation.
This study examines the influence of an extra-curricular educational program on children's knowledge and cultural valuation of wild food plants, which are an important component of their diets. This program aims to reinforce children's traditional knowledge and values around biological resources in Wayanad, India's Western Ghats, encouraging tribal and non-tribal children to learn from each other and from their own communities. Results show that the educational program has enhanced children's ability to identify selected wild food plants.
This paper is a contribution to the establishment of a new capacity development (CD) 9 strategy, a process that the Consortium Office will facilitate, with external input, during 2013. The paper explores the lessons learned from CGIAR’s experience with CD and reflects the findings of a working group that was brought together in late 2012. The objective of the paper is to identify the roles that individual and institutional CD might play in CGIAR in order to increase CGIAR’s impact on the welfare of smallholder farmers and the sustainability of their farming systems.
The present article reviews the results and methodological design of an evaluation at higher education centres in Bolivia, Ghana and India. The ambition of these programmes was to integrate endogenous knowledge and values into education and research programmes. The evaluation provides an example of a mixed methods design that allowed for inclusion and appreciation of perspectives of different stakeholders. An evaluation team has to consider which set of methods is responding to the project context and how the methods complement each other and can be adapted to the case.
Since the early 1990s, Uganda has implemented a number of reforms in the agricultural sector. However, in the past 10 years, the performance of the sector has lagged behind other sectors particularly services and industry. There are concerns among researchers and policy analysts that institutional constraints in agriculture play a central role in the lacklustre agricultural performance registered during the 2000s. This study examines the institutional constraints affecting agricultural production in Uganda.