Generation Challenge Program : Follow-Up on Executive Council and Science Council Inquiries

This report was prepared for the autumn 2004 meetings of ExCo and the Science Council. It was later discussed during the CGIAR Business Meeting at AGM 2004. The report is a detailed response to inquiries made by the Executive Council and the Science Council regarding the challenge program's goals and added values

Meeting the information challenge: exploring partnerships with Africa

Africa suffers from the disadvantages of marginality within the global technical system and a legacy of externally driven infrastructure. Developments in information and communication technologies now offer the chance to redress these but the technologies require skills and capacities which are scarce. The technologies themselves can be used to leverage existing resources so that the necessary skills can be developed. However this process needs to take account of African priorities and requirements if the current inequitable situation is not to be reproduced in a new global infrastructure. The key to this is a balance between external partnership and internal collaboration. The African diaspora offers a means of moderating such relationships

Listening, Learning, and Leading Together: Insights from The BUILD Health Challenge's 2021 Listening Tour

This report synthesizes learnings from listening sessions with past awardees and interviewswith external stakeholders which explored how The BUILD Health Challenge® (BUILD) canreflect a community-forward and racial equity centered program in design and practice.

Europe's clean technology investment challenge

Development and deployment of clean-energy technologies is crucial if climate targets are to be met cost-effectively. The European Union already has a plan that deals with these issues: the Strategic Energy Technology Plan, which has become central to the achievement of the EU's ambitions. In a period of constrained public finances, if governments want to leverage the necessary private innovation for clean-energy technologies, they will have to provide well-designed time-consistent policies, reducing commercial and financial risk through a combination of consistent carbon pricing, regulations and public funding, which will have to give a sizable and consistent push to early-stage clean-energy technologies, with a clear exit strategy. But first and foremost, governments should establish a sufficiently high and long-term predictable carbon price. The design of the EU emissions trading system and the distribution of carbon allowances should take into account more explicitly its power to leverage innovation. A move to a 30 percent EU emissions reduction target, which would involve a tighter emissions cap and fewer allowances being auctioned, would result would result in a higher carbon price and provide greater incentives for innovation.

Moving to Center: BUILD's Journey to Advance Health Equity

In this report, BUILD examines their journey, including the moments of growth, learnings, and pivot points that shifted their practice and advanced our mission. Moving to Center: BUILD's Journey to Advance Health Equity offers a look back at how the role of equity evolved to become a critical and catalyzing driver of this national initiative, and offers strategies and key takeaways for others who may be on a similar journey

Linking natural product producer & processor organisations to natural product enterprises: a discussion of past, present and future models

The big idea for sustainability for indigenous natural product (INP) harvesting is that communities have a reason to protect and manage their resources when those resources pay them a suitable regular income. Forming a long-term healthy commercial relationship between harvesting groups (Producing and Processing Organisations - PPO’s) and up-stream companies that develop and promote products from INPs is one of the essential steps along the pathway to proving this big idea works. Namibia has, arguably, one of the richest recent histories of developing such PPO/commercial INP enterprise models and there is much to learn from considering the range of approaches that have been adopted. In this Chapter the aim is to share the range of models and enterprise/PPO interactions tested during the MCA-Namibia INP Programme period, many of which build upon a much longer history of similar efforts going back to the Colonial times. We shall draw some conclusions about what models might be suitable to meet the current and future problems facing the INP sector in Namibia and what important lessons we have learned. Six main types of INP – SME relationships (sometimes called “models”) are identified. These are: the ‘Trader model’, the ‘NGO model’, the ‘Government model’, the local ‘SME led model’, the ‘PPO model’, and a ‘future model’. Considering the INP sector today, it could be said that all of these models are now present and working in parallel