Research & Extension

Publications

Jun 2017
Communiqué from FAO Side Event, 3 October 2016 7th GFRAS Annual Meeting, 3–7 October 2016, Limbé, Cameroon

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Sep 2016
The purpose of this report is to provide an overview of the experience of input shops in Niger focusing on their impact on the supply system in the country.

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Aug 2016
Rural Advisory Services (RAS) are key to agricultural development and to improve the livelihood of millions of family farmers. This policy document looks at what are the specific needs of family farms and the response needed by RAS. The document results from several initiatives held during IYFF 2014: the FAO-GFRAS side event organized at the 5th GFRAS Annual Meeting in Buenos Aires on ‘RAS for family farms’, the side event during the Global Dialogue on Family Farming at FAO HQ and the FAO e-conference on ‘Tailoring RAS to family farms’.

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Jul 2016
Dec 2015
The study describes the historic development of the Danish Agricultural Advisory Services (DAAS). This is the case of a national advisory system owned and managed by the farmer organizations and financed with public subsidies combined with farmer/user payments, gradually developed to full user payment. The links and relations between the empowerment of farmers and their organizations, their evolving roles in advisory systems, and the innovative financial mechanisms in extension, especially pull-mechanisms, are analyzed.

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Dec 2015
While the Agricultural Science and Technology Indicators (ASTI) initiative provides data and analysis of domestic public and private spending on agricultural research and development for a wide range of developing countries, the literature pays little attention, if any, to foreign assistance to agricultural, fishing and forestry research and agricultural extension. The objective of the present study is to fill this gap and offer a comprehensive analysis of 2002 to 2012 OECD data on foreign assistance to research and extension in agriculture, forestry and fishing.

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Nov 2015
This report establishes the concept of the capacity to innovate, which depends not only on hard technical capacities, but also softer functional capacities across the individual, organizational, and enabling environment scales. It argues that developing country-level innovation capacity requires an iterative capacity development process based around assessment. After reviewing the relevant assessment methods and tools, a general framework for assessing the capacity to innovate is proposed and applicable tools are suggested that explore key areas that influence the capacity to innovate.

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Nov 2015
The Farmer Field School (FFS) approach has been very successful and witnessed a strong expansion in many areas beyond crop production. Notwithstanding this success, the adoption of FFS in national extension often remains problematic and FFS activities have often been implemented in the margin of national institutions with strong reliance on donor funding. The creation of an enabling environment for institutional support is essential for expanding the effort, improving quality, and strengthening impact and continuity of the FFSs. This paper aims to analyse opportunities, challenges and implications of institutionalizing FFS at the national level.

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