This report on actors and issues in rural advisory services (RAS) aims to provide the required background information and analysis that will – together with other ongoing validation activities – enable GFRAS, the Global Forum for Rural Advisory Services, to develop its long-term strategies and work plans in order to fulfil its mission and functions. The report on actors and issues in rural advisory services (RAS) is based on a review of primary and secondary documentation about RAS and their stakeholders, undertaken in 2010.

This guide has been prepared for use in facilitating and promoting growth in priority sectors already agreed in Decent Work Country Programmes that are based on national priorities owned and led by the constituents (Government and its social partners Employers/Business and Workers). Decent Work Country Programmes are part of national development frameworks focusing on national priorities; they are not ILO programmes.

This book reports on the Papa Andina Partnership Program, which has been an especially innovative and productive regional initiative, bringing together researchers, small farmers, diverse market actors, and dozens of organizations in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru to spur innovation in public policies, potato products, and value market chains.

Conference proceedings of a 3-day workshop on Communicating Carbon, organized and hosted by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security (CCAFS), which brought together field practitioners from carbon projects to exchange lessons learned and to develop improved skills related to communication about carbon projects.The workshop has highlighted best communication practices used to inform farmers about carbon markets, contracts, and risks involved in engaging with carbon projects.

The Centre for Development Research (CDR), in collaboration with local partnership managed by the Bangladesh Agricultural University worked to establish a platform (i.e. a participatory rural video centre) that acts upon fostering rural women’s capacity for agricultural innovation in the north-west and north-east region of Bangladesh. In this paper, the authors elaborate principles of establishing the centre, and some evidences on Farmers’ Participatory Research (FPR) in the community.

This paper examines how the different institutional innovations arising from various permutations of linkages and interactions of ARD organizations (national, international advanced agricultural research centres and universities) influenced the different outcomes in addressing identified ARD problems.

The Global Forum for Rural Advisory Services (GFRAS) has commissioned the Natural Resources Institute to develop a toolkit for the evaluation of extension (projects, programmes, tools and initiatives). This commission has a number of components:

This Policy Management Brief, which draws on the findings of an ECDPM study on capacity, change and performance, aims to contribute to a growing body of knowledge on capacity development. It does so by highlighting the study’s main findings on how capacity develops as well as by taking account of evolving insights on this discussion.

The Capacity Development Results Framework (CDRF or the Framework) is a powerful new approach to the design, implementation, monitoring, management, and evaluation of development programs. Originally conceived to address well-documented problems in the narrow field of capacity development, the Framework can be profitably applied to assess the feasibility and coherence of proposed development projects, to monitor projects during implementation (with a view to taking corrective action), or to assess the results, or even the design, of completed projects. 

The emergence of a globalised knowledge economy, and the contemporary views of innovation capacity that this trend enables and informs, provides a new context in which development assistance to agricultural research and development needs to be considered. The main argument in this paper, which focuses on The Netherlands, is that development assistance should use this emerging scenario to identify niches where inputs can add value to the R&D investments of others, particularly in activities that help wire up innovation systems, linking R&D to other activities and actors in society.