The purpose of this report is to show how development issues and policy initiatives shaped the design and structure of the science, technology, and innovation (STI) capacity-building program that eventually emerged from the partnership between the Government of Rwanda and the World Bank.

This report is organized into nine chapters. Chapter one provides the introduction to the report. Chapter two presents alternative approaches to agribusiness development and chapter three discusses the role of agribusiness incubators. Chapter four discusses the challenges of agribusiness incubators and chapter five presents a typology of agribusiness incubators. Chapter six elaborates on the evolution of incubators over time. Chapter seven presents the analysis of impact and cost-benefits. Chapter eight summarizes good practices and lessons learned.

Many experts believe that low-cost mitigation opportunities in agriculture are abundant and comparable in scale to those found in the energy sector. They are mostly located in developing countries and have to do with how land is used. By investing in projects under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), countries can tap these opportunities to meet their own Kyoto Protocol obligations. The CDM has been successful in financing some types of agricultural projects, including projects that capture methane or use agricultural by-products as an energy source.

The overall objective of the Comprehensive Assessment of the Agricultural Sector (CAAS) is to provide an evidence base to enable appropriate strategic policy responses by the Government of Liberia (GoL) and its development partners in order to maximize the contribution of the agriculture sector to the Government's overarching policy objectives. Given the strong relationship between growth in agricultural productivity and poverty reduction, future efforts in Liberia need to focus on productivity enhancing measures with a pro-poor focus that increase incomes.

This study builds a profile of the status of poverty and vulnerability in Malawi. Malawi is a small land-locked country, with one of the highest population densities in Sub-Saharan Africa, and one of the lowest per capita income levels in the world. Almost 90 percent of the population lives in rural areas, and is mostly engaged in smallholder, rain-fed agriculture. Most people are therefore highly vulnerable to annual rainfall volatility. The majority of households cultivate very small landholdings, largely for subsistence.

Agriculture is among the most risk-prone sectors in the economies of Central Asia. Production shocks from weather, pests and diseases and adverse movements in agricultural product and input prices not only impact farmers and agri-business firms, but can also strain government finances. Some of these risks are small and localized and can be managed by producers. Others are the result of more severe, exogenous shocks outside agriculture that require a broader response.

The sector review includes seven chapters and one annex. This first chapter is an overview of agriculture, irrigation and the purpose and content of this report. The second chapter provides a review of the Bank s own strategy and priorities for irrigation and drainage within its portfolio of investments, from the time of its 2004 Strategy until the present. It also includes a short summary of key lessons learned in this sector.

Uganda pioneered the use of budget support operations known as Poverty Reduction Support Credits (PRSCs) in the World Bank. PRSCs were designed to channel programmatic lending to support policy and institutional reforms in support of a country's Poverty Reduction Strategy, usually presented in the form of a Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP). In the case of Uganda the PRSCs were designed as a series of annual credits supporting a three year rolling program of reforms, based on Uganda's version of a PRSC, which is known as the Poverty Eradication Action Plan (PEAP) .

This new Africa Region Sustainable Development Series aims to focus international attention on a range of topics, spur debate, and use robust, evidence-based, informed approaches to advance policy dialogue and policy-making. This new Series synthesizes a large body of work from disparate sources, and uses simple language to convey the findings in an easily-digestible format. Ultimately, we want to seed solutions that can help accelerate the fight to end poverty in Africa.

This report tells the story of a gender pilot that was carried out in water users' organizations for irrigated agriculture in the Peruvian highlands or Sierra region. It was designed upon the request of Peru's ministry of agriculture, with the objective to strengthen the role of women in water management and to improve their condition as agricultural producers. At first, a gender diagnostic was carried out to better understand the different barriers that hinder the attendance and thus equality of participation of women in trainings and meetings.