STI Side-event: Better leveraging Science, Technology, Innovation and Engineering for Accelerating Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals

Thank you for inviting me as a discussant of this important side event.

My intervention today will focus on co-designing of science based technological and innovative solutions to address the major challenges we face.

As we all know, the top-down technology transfer linear model is not the way forward.

A closer collaboration between the STI communities and all stakeholders including societal actors and policy-makers is critical for co-designing of STI solutions.

I am pleased to share our experiences in strengthening international north-south cooperation in STI, especially by highlighting the work from one of the G20 initiatives, Tropical Agriculture Platform (TAP).

The Tropical Agriculture Platform (TAP) is a multi-lateral facilitation mechanism for strengthening the capacity for innovation by promoting integrated Agricultural Innovation Systems in the tropics and sub-tropics.

TAP was officially launched at the first G20 Meeting of Agriculture Chief Scientists (MACS) in 2012.

FAO hosts the Secretariat. The Governance includes – Partners Assembly, Steering Committee, technical working groups and a global knowledge portal TAPipedia.

The partners include – regional agricultural research and extension organizations, global fora for agricultural research, consortia of research and innovation, national academic and research institutions, inter-governmental bodies, development partners, civil society organizations including farmers organizations.

Our main focus of capacity development has been strengthening of functional capacities for co-creation, sharing and implementation of innovations.

The functional capacity includes capacity to navigate complex institutional landscapes, collaboration and coordination, knowledge exchange, engage in the innovation policy processes, and implementation of portfolio of innovations for agroecological transition, conservation agriculture, climate actions, digital agriculture, value chain development etc.,

Our Capacity development efforts targets triple pathway approach – Innovation niche partnerships for co-creation of locally relevant innovations, innovation support services at intermediary level and enabling environment at the policy level.

I would like to highlight three key interventions at the country to enable co-creation of knowledge and innovation.

• Capacity development of Agricultural Innovation Systems (AIS) – need to focus on functional capacity development - capacity to navigate complex institutional landscape, capacity to share and learn from each other, capacity to contribute to the policy processes, capacity to integrate the priorities into the policies for scaling up - for a more coherent and integrated AIS by strengthening national agricultural research systems and extension and advisory services.
• Strengthening of institutional mechanisms at the country level to bring various actors together for co-development of technologies and innovations to address location specific issues.
• Promoting integration of AIS perspectives into the agriculture and food security policies and promoting investment in AIS for developing enabling environment for co-creation of knowledge and innovation.

TAP supported over 30 countries and more than 50 regional and national research and innovation networks to integrate TAP common Framework and Capacity Development and development of research and innovation strategies.

The TAP’s work and its action plan is closely aligned with key and evolving principles of open innovation, co-creation and knowledge exchange.

We are looking forward to further sharing of experiences and interested to collaborate with partners for implementation of TAP action plan.

Thank you for your attention!