The role of community engagement in the adoption of new agricultural biotechnologies by farmers: the case of the Africa harvest tissue-culture banana in Kenya

BACKGROUND: The tissue culture banana (TCB) is a biotechnological agricultural innovation that has been adopted widely in commercial banana production. In 2003, Africa Harvest Biotech Foundation International (AH) initiated a TCB program that was explicitly developed for smallholder farmers in Kenya to help them adopt the TCB as a scalable agricultural business opportunity. At the heart of the challenge of encouraging more widespread adoption of the TCB is the question: what is the best way to introduce the TCB technology, and all its attendant practices and opportunities, to smallholder farmers. In essence, a challenge of community or stakeholder engagement (CE). RESULTS: In this paper, we report the results of a case study of the CE strategies employed by AH to introduce TCB agricultural practices to small-hold farmers in Kenya, and their impact on the uptake of the TCB, and on the nature of the relationship between AH and the relevant community of farmers and other stakeholders. We identified six specific features of CE in the AH TCB project that were critical to its effectiveness: (1) adopting an empirical, “evidence-based” approach; (2) building on existing social networks; (3) facilitating farmer-to-farmer engagement; (4) focusing engagement on farmer groups; (5) strengthening relationships of trust through collaborative experiential learning; and (6) helping farmers to “learn the marketing game”. We discuss the implications of AH’s “values-based” approach to engagement, and how these guiding values functioned as “design constraints” for the key features of their CE strategy. And we highlight the importance of attention to the human dimensions of complex partnerships as a key determinant of successful CE. CONCLUSION: Our findings suggest new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between CE and the design and delivery of new technologies for global health and global development

Technology adoption and the multiple dimensions of food security: the case of maize in Tanzania

The paper analyses the impact of agricultural technologies on the four pillars of food security for maize farmers in Tanzania. Relying on both matching techniques and endogenous switching regression models, we use a nationally representative dataset collected over the period 2010/2011 to estimate the causal effects of using improved seeds and inorganic fertilizers on food availability, access, utilization, and stability. Our results show that the adoption of both technologies has a positive and significant impact on food availability while for access, utilization and stability we observe heterogeneity between improved seeds and inorganic fertilizers as well as across the food security pillars. The study supports the idea that the relationship between agricultural technologies and food security is a complex phenomenon, which cannot be limited to the use of welfare indexes as proxy for food security