The experiences shared in this book of Conversations of Change capture the outcomes of three years’ work conducted by the eight CDAIS country teams from Angola, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Honduras, Laos and Rwanda. Collected between January and March 2019, they provide insights and perspectives of different actors engaged in the different capacity strengthening processes, within individuals and innovation niche partnerships, and at organisational and national level.

FAO Eritrea, in partnership with the Ministry of Agriculture is implementing the national component of a global project entitled “Developing capacity in Agriculture Innovation System project: Scaling up the Tropical Agriculture Platform Framework”.

The global impacts of the climate crisis are becoming ever clearer, and natural resources and ecosystems are being depleted. Despite some progress, hunger and poverty persist, and inequalities are deepening. The world is realizing that unsustainable high external inputs and resource-intensive industrialized systems pose a real danger of biodiversity loss, increased greenhouse gas emissions, shortages of healthy food, and the impoverishment of dispossessed peasants around the world.

In the rapidly changing context of agri-food systems, extension and advisory services (EAS) are expected to provide new roles and services that go well beyond the traditional production-related technology transfer. Consequently, pluralistic EAS systems with diverse actors have emerged with diverse actors, including private and civil society organisations. These multiple EAS actors must adopt innovative entrepreneurship models if they are to act proactively and respond to the increasing diversity of farmers’ demands while staying independent and sustainable.

Women play a key role in agriculture and food security, making up around 48 percent of the agricultural labour force in low-income countries. Despite this, their important contribution is hardly visible and largely unrecognized. Gender equality regards human rights but gender-based constraints in the sector cause also major inefficiencies in value chains, and are a key impediment for rural development, food security, and social and environmental sustainability. Moreover, the severe and multidimensional constraints faced by women hamper their productive potential and livelihoods.

Bees provide a critical link in the maintenance of ecosystems, pollination. They play a major role in maintaining biodiversity, ensuring the survival of many plants, enhancing forest regeneration, providing sustainability and adaptation to climate change and improving the quality and quantity of agricultural production systems. In fact, close to 75 percent of the world’s crops that produce fruits and seeds for human consumption depend, at least in part, on pollinators for sustained production, yield and quality.

This note is a preview on the agricultural innovation systems (AIS) assessment methdology which is being tested in the nine countries of the European Union-funded TAP-AIS DeSIRA project. It presents the rationale, the steps, ethe expected outputs and outcomes.

Assessing or understanding the agriculture innovation system (AIS) is an essential step to better understand the needs, new skills and functions needed by the actors and the system. To accelerate the uptake of innovation and progress towards eradicating poverty, there is an urgent need for well-coordinated, demand-driven, and market-oriented information, knowledge, technologies and services.