How can education and training contribute to Africa’s agricultural growth potential? This paper examines the role of education to increased agricultural productivity and the key areas in which education and training policies, reforms, programmes and investments combine to set Africa firmly on the path to sustainable agricultural development.

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 importance of agriculture to Mongolia’s economy, and to its rural economy in particular, makes sustainable agricultural development a national priority. The transition from collective socialism to a market economy in the 1990s nearly caused the collapse of the entire agriculture sector. Since privatization, the number of livestock animals, mainly sheep and goats, has increased dramatically, reaching 45.1 million in 2012. This growth in both livestock and crop production was enabled by several factors. Yet investment in research and extension remains very low.

 This report describes issues presented and discussed at a workshop held in Rwanda from 6 - 8 September 2012, focused on strengthening capacity in agricultural innovation in post-conflict and protracted crisis (2PC) countries. It was the first workshop of its kind that attempted to bring participants from 2PC countries around the globe to rally around a common cause.

One of the most important things that innovation platforms do is to build the capacity of their members to innovate. Some key elements of innovation capacity include: self-organization, learning new skills, changing mindsets, valuing others’ roles in innovation, having a holistic view, being able to adapt to changing situations, creating new ideas, recognizing opportunities, being proactive, using indigenous ideas, and looking to the future. This brief uses the analogy of a traditional African cooking pot to explain how innovation capacity is developed within an innovation platform.

This is the first chapter of the book "Innovation platforms for agricultural development: Evaluating the mature innovation platforms landscape". It introduces the background, case study competition process, case study characterization and readers’ guide, and book outline. Characterization of the case studies includes their geographical spread, age and life stage of the platforms, and specific information on the multi-stakeholder processes, the content matter, platform support functions, and outcomes and impacts.

This is a chapter of the book Innovation platforms for agricultural development edited by Iddo Dror, Jean-Joseph Cadilhon, Marc Schut, Michael Misiko and Shreya Maheshwari.

The CGIAR Research Program on Integrated System for the Humid Tropics, or Humidtropics, works towards transforming the lives of the rural poor in several action sites in Asia, Africa and Tropical America. In doing so, different technologies and innovations were implemented and while at first the capacity development was going on almost intuitively, as an integrated part of the implementation process, it has soon become clear that such groundbreaking activities and ideas require a more organized and supervised approach.

Capacity development (CapDev) is increasingly acknowledged as a crucial part of agricultural development. In the CGIAR Strategic Results Framework (SRF), CapDev is included as a ‘cross-cutting issue’ and as a strategic enabler of Research for Development (R4D) impact for CGIAR and its partners. It goes far beyond the transfer of knowledge and skills through training, and cuts across multiple levels.

This brief is part of a series of ‘Legacy Products’ developed under the CGIAR Research Program on Integrated Systems for the Humid Tropics (Humidtropics – www.humidtropics.org ) to help CGIAR Research Programs integrate key ‘capacity development in systems’ concepts into their work. It introduces the rationale of capacity needs assessment, frameworks/steps and requirements.