Platform for African – European Partnership in Agricultural Research for Development

Thursday, October 11, 2012

Tropentag 2012, Resilience of agricultural systems against crises

19–21 September 2012, Göttingen, Germany. The Tropentag is a development-oriented and interdisciplinary conference. It addresses issues of resource management, environment, agriculture, forestry, fisheries, food, nutrition and related sciences in the context of rural development, sustainable resource use and poverty alleviation worldwide.

The annual Conference on Tropical and Subtropical Agricultural and Natural Resource Management (TROPENTAG) is jointly organised by the universities of Bonn, Göttingen, Hohenheim, Kassel-Witzenhausen, Hamburg, Zurich as well as by the Council for Tropical and Subtropical Research (ATSAF e.V) in co-operation with the GIZ Advisory Service on Agricultural Research for Development (BEAF).

Tropentag 2012 was organised jointly by the faculty of agricultural sciences and the faculty of forestry of the Georg-August Universität Göttingen and the faculty of organic agricultural sciences of the University of Kassel. The conference venue will be in Göttingen, Germany. All students, Ph.D. students, scientists, extension workers, decision makers, politicians and practical farmers, interested and engaged in agricultural research and rural development in the tropics and subtropics are invited to participate and to contribute. 

Water and energy
Post-harvest technology
Food, health and nutrition

Modelling
Systems modelling
Systems modelling II

Development Cooperation
Soils and resilience (CIAT session)
Poetry route
Central issues on resilience of agricultural systems against crises (GIZ session) 


The Joint Learning in Innovation Systems in African Agriculture (JOLISAA) program, represented by Vincent Archiba Schmitt, shared recent experiences on innovation processes involving multiple stakeholders and types of knowledge.

Innovation Systems (IS) perspective inspires the framework of the JOLISAA research. IS stressed that the flow of technology and information among stakeholders is key to innovative processes. The project uses several avenues (inclusion/exclusion criteria, storyline, common underlying concepts, and iterative processes) to identify relevant innovations for deeper assessment and joint learning. JOLISSA lists selected innovations in three national inventories (BeninKenya, and South Africa).

Jointly, practitioners and researchers assess 13 cases from the existing national inventories. The key steps in this collaborative case assessments are: i) planning meetings, ii) focus group discussions, iii) multi-stakeholders feedback, and iv) literature review.

First findings of the study show that African innovation processes at smallholders level have the capacities to take advantage of opportunities, create markets, and manage natural resources. The project recommends long term support (min. 10 years) in dynamic, iterative and flexible manner adapted to specificities of context. This allows unfolding of multiple stakeholders processes and widespread impact of innovations in the African agricultural sector.

If you are interested and work on this topic, do not miss the international event JOLISAA will organize late may 2013, Kenya.

Proceedings
of the 2012 conference as PDF (2.3MB)

Tropentag 2013 will be held at the University of Hohenheim,
17 - 19 September 2013

Title: Agricultural development within the rural-urban continuum

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