The
UN General Assembly has declared 2014 to be the International Year of Family
Farming and has invited FAO to facilitate implementation of the International
Year, in collaboration with its partners. Among its initiatives for the
International Year, FAO is planning to publish a major study on family farming
and Agricultural innovation systems (AIS) in 2014 in the State of Food and
Agriculture series, which is FAO’s major annual flagship publication.
Agricultural
innovation systems are systems of individuals, organizations and enterprises
that bring new products, processes and forms of organization into social and
economic use to achieve food security, economic development and sustainable
natural resource management. AIS include a multitude of potential actors, such
as producer organizations, research organizations, extension and advisory
services, universities and educational bodies, governments and civil society
organizations, co-coordinating bodies, individual farmers and farm laborers,
and the private sector (including traders, processors, supermarkets etc.).
The
e-mail conference is open to everyone, is free and will be moderated.
The Background
Document to this FAO e-mail conference is available here.
Meeting
the needs of smallholder farming families also provides the central theme of
the GCARD RoadMap, which sets out the systematic changes
required to transform and strengthen innovation systems to better meet the needs
of resource-poor smallholders around the world. Results from the FAO
e-mail consultation will help inform discussion in The Second Global Conference on
Agricultural Research for Development (GCARD 2): “Foresight and
partnership for innovation and impact on small-holder livelihoods” on
practical actions underway and that are required to implement these systematic
changes. The GCARD 2 will be organized in Punta del Este,
Uruguay, 29 October – 1 November 2012, more information is available on the GFAR website.
The Pre-Registration
for the GCARD 2012 Conference is now open.
Outcomes
from the email consultation and the GCARD Conference will inform preparation of
the major FAO study in 2014, as well as help to build cooperation around key
forward-looking agendas and facilitate planning of joint actions among all AIS
stakeholders to deliver large scale development outcomes.
PAEPARD contribution:
Moderated conference on agricultural innovation systems: a selection of the most significant contributions, relevant for PAEPARD.
PAEPARD contribution:
Moderated conference on agricultural innovation systems: a selection of the most significant contributions, relevant for PAEPARD.
·
In order to identify a pool of brokers on the
African continent we launched a call for agricultural innovation facilitators
(AIF) 1 year ago. We were at that time not aware that ASARECA was in the
process of the creation of a pool of well-skilled platform facilitators for
innovation platforms under their Farmer Empowerment for Innovation in
Smallholder Agriculture (FEISA) project.
o 203
applicants submitted their CV to PAEPARD.
o The
screening of the CVs was based on the geographical origin (country) and the
profile of the applicant (research, farmer organisation (FO), private sector,
nongovernmental organisation (NGO), ministry, consultant or other).
o Not
surprisingly 160 were male applicants and 43 female.
o 86
applicants had a [agricultural) research profile, 36 applicants worked for an
ngo, 21 for a farmer organization, 17
consultants, 16 from a Ministry, 14 private, 6 extensionists, 4 other.
o But
the career path revealed that the basic
training of the majority of all profiles originated in agricultural research.
o A
past training (in Montpellier or in Wageningen) with the International Centre
for development oriented Research in Agriculture (ICRA) was a strong reference
for the selection.
We are currently performing an
evaluation of the brokers' facilitation in 10 ARD consortia from the
consortium's coordinator perspective and the AIFs' perspective. And we realize
that a technically sound agronomist with facilitation training is a rare gem.
In the agricultural research community, we only managed to identify few good
experts in group dynamics, adult training, moderation, knowledge management,
etc.
We also realized that because
(so far) the dominant PAEPARD partnership model has been the AIF (broker)
functioning in a project context,
this had some important limitations in terms of innovation. The stress is too
much on project innovation instead of
system wide innovation by involving several societal actors, including farmers,
supply and processing industry, civic advocacy organization, and policy makers.
The reason why we opted first for the project partnership model is obvious: we
wanted to link the brokering to something tangible: the submission of a research
proposal to a funding opportunity, as a milestone of the consortium
facilitation (a process of minimum one year).
The requirement for the
facilitator to be able to play an independent role within the consortium was
essential. Preferably, the facilitator should not be a member of the lead
institution (the applicant), to ensure a balance of influence on the
consortium. The AIF needed nevertheless to be a person [all] the consortium
members felt comfortable with. We wanted the choice of an AIF to be done
through a consultation between the consortium and the PAEPARD-trained AIF. But in one case the AIF with an ngo profile
found it difficult to impose her authority towards the researchers involved in
the consortium, and in another case AIFs with a research profile failed in
their facilitation - not having "the spirit and training for facilitation
and brokerage".
Conclusion: testing
theoretical concepts into practice, but also to translate practical dilemmas
into systemic lessons is a major challenge. [Platform for African - European Partnership in
ARD]
