Policy makers and development practitioners who are responsible for developing investment strategies to promote economic growth find many challenges in the changing face of agriculture in the twenty-first century. In addition to its productive role of providing food, clothing, fuel, and housing for a growing world population, agriculture assumes other roles, the importance of which has more recently been recognized. In addition to its essential role in food security, agricultural development is now seen as a vital and high-impact source of poverty reduction.

Local innovation refers to the dynamics of Indigenous Knowledge (IK) - the knowledge that grows within a social group, incorporating learning from own experience over generations but also knowledge gained from other sources and fully internalized within local ways of thinking and doing. Local innovation is the process through which individuals or groups discover or develop new and better ways of managing resources - building on and expanding the boundaries of their IK.

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Diversity field school (DFS) is a community-based action designed to create a platform for learning and sharing of crop diversity related knowledge and information. DFS places an emphasis on agency, participation, and empowerment, and seeks to develop both the knowledge base and leadership potential of local farmers. It adopts the models of farmers’ field school and community based management through a lens of crop genetic diversity.

The biodiversity of food plants is vital for humanity's capacity to meet sustainability challenges. This goal requires the rigorous integration of plant, environmental, social and health sciences. It is coalescing around four thematic cornerstones that are both interdisciplinary and policy relevant.

The authors surveyed small-scale farmers in the Kenyan Rift Valley province (Narok and Nakuru districts) to describe constraints to, and changes in, livestock production and to assess the extent to which farmers have adopted new technologies promoted by extension services. In the arid areas of southern Narok, farmer's main constraints were drought and disease. Farmers in Nakuru district, situated in the fertile highlands of the Rift Valley, were also affected by disease but also lacked markets and capital.

Communications and knowledge management are essential activities to help the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) achieve its development outcomes. Strategic and complementary communication helps highlight success stories, support a change in behaviour in next-users while expanding the program’s reach. This in turn will help Flagships and regions follow impact pathways and reach outcomes. This is CCAFS Program Approach to Communication.

Background: Opportunities to use data and information to address challenges in international agricultural research and development are expanding rapidly. The use of agricultural trial and evaluation data has enormous potential to improve crops and management practices. However, for a number of reasons, this potential has yet to be realized.

The gender capacity assessment in Ethiopia, which took place in December 2016, analysed the current gender capacities against desired future gender capacities of the African Chicken Genetic Gains (ACGG) partners. It measured six core gender capacities at organizational and at individual (staff) levels of all six engaged national and regional research institutes. These capacities are assessed in relation to the environmental (contextual) level; the institutional and policy environment that enables or disables the other capacities.

Under the REGATTA Initiative (Regional Portal for Technology Transfer and Action against Climate Change in Latin America and Caribbean) this project seeks to develop actions towards vulnerability and adaptation to climate change assessment in agriculture and water resources in the Andes of Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.

This paper presents a case study of the work carried out by CIAT to facilitate the creation of a community of practice, using Dgroups and taking advantage of this virtual space to apply a qualitative monitoring technique called Most Significant Change. The experience reported here mixed key ingredients to create and facilitate a community of practice to facilitate knowledge sharing and communication flow among 14 learning and knowledge sharing centres in Latin America and the Caribbean.