TOWARDS A FARMER-GOVERNED APPROACH TO AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH FOR DEVELOPMENT: LESSONS FROM INTERNATIONAL EXPERIENCES WITH LOCAL INNOVATION SUPPORT FUNDS

International audienceNovel mechanisms for funding agricultural research for development (ARD) are emerging which strive to give smallholders a central role in deciding what types of innovation they want to explore and develop and how to do this. This paper reports on international experiences with one such mechanism, the Local Innovation Support Fund (LISF), which is being piloted in eight countries across Asia and Africa under the umbrella of the PROLINNOVA international partnership programme. The ways of setting up the LISFs vary greatly between countries, in response to country-specific conditions, experiences and opportunities, but all share certain structural elements: ensuring farmers' effective control over fund governance; making calls for proposals that farmers can easily understand and respond to; developing and applying effective screening criteria; and monitoring and evaluating systematically how the funds are used, the outcomes of the work and the impacts on farmers' lives, including their ability to influence ARD decision-making. After presenting the general rationale for the LISF pilot, the paper examines the diverse results obtained across countries in terms of structure and process of grant administration; number, size and types of grants; thematic foci; monitoring and impact assessment. Some critical issues are discussed: the importance of understanding concepts and its implications for LISF implementation, the purposes for which farmers use the funds, the pros and cons of supporting farmers' own experimentation versus farmer-led joint experimentation, and the perspectives for sustainability and scaling-up of the LISF approach within and beyond the eight countries in which it has been piloted

Farmers' Research in Practice: Lessons From The Field

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Towards demand-driven services? The role of feedback mechanisms in agribusiness-based advisory services for smallholder farmers

In many developing countries, agribusinesses are highly engaged in providing services to smallholder farmers, including agricultural advisory services or extension. As private service providers depend on farmers’ choice, eliciting farmer feedback and learning from farmers’ demands seem to become more important. However, the phenomenon of agribusiness-based advisory services has received relatively little attention in the study of advisory services. Little is known on whether and how agribusinesses operationalize the idea of demand-driven service provision. This is a critical oversight as agribusinesses are increasingly present as service providers and hence shape the prevailing service landscape for smallholder farmers. Based on a study of 29 agribusinesses providing advisory services to farmers in developing countries, this paper explores the extent to which agribusinesses provide demand-driven services based on farmer feedback and how they integrate and learn from such feedback