Transcript Morocco Presentation - African Development Bank

Innovations for Agricultural
Development in Africa
African Development Bank
Agriculture & Agro-industry Department
Tunis, Tunisia, 30-31 October 2007
Presentation Outline
1. Background
2. Reversing the decline in African agriculture
3. Innovation and Innovation Systems as potential
models for reversing the decline
4. Application of innovation systems in African
Agriculture and the Bank’s possible support
towards leveraging their benefits
Setting the stage: what we do
• Responding to needs and requests of RMC
and in line with CAADP
• Most of the projects are designed to address
the greatest challenge in Africa: poverty.
• Poverty is both a cause and effect of hunger.
Many hungry people live in ‘poverty traps’
beyond the reach of markets
• Agriculture is the engine of growth for
development and should be the driving force
for poverty eradication
MDG TARGETS:
Maintaining a “business as usual” stance, SSA will not attain key MDG targets
Source: World Bank 2005
IFPRI studies project that the most effective way to attain
MDG targets is through higher investments in: (1) rural roads
(2) agricultural research; (3) irrigation; (4) Clean water and
(5) education
MDG targets: The poor and hungry:
• Live mainly in rural
areas and reliant on
rain-fed, subsistence
agriculture
• Are unable to grow
or buy enough food
to meet their dietary
requirements
• Are highly vulnerable
to risks beyond their
control
Cycle underlying the decline in African livelihoods
Unfavourable
economic returns
to agricultural
production
Unsustainable
agricultural
practices
Most of Africa’s gains in food production
have been through expansion
African agriculture has registered some successes
• Varietal improvements (nerica rice mosaic
resistant cassava, IR Maize etc)
• Increased use of inputs (soil fertility, fodder, pest
management)
• Improved water capture and use (irrigation)
• Infrastructure (roads, dams) to support the above
However, these have not had wide
scale impact due to:
• Poor linkages between production,
processing, trade/marketing & consumption
• Inadequate human & financial resources
• Weak institutional frameworks including
paternerships for addressing these issues
Local
variety
Experimental
Value addition & markets
Successful out grower
schemes have
demonstrated the benefits
of linking production to
markets and the role of
policies and institutions in
assuring success
Reversing the decline of African agriculture
requires:
Improving
Infrastructure and
Trade-related
Capacities for Market
Access
Agricultural Research, Technology Uptake Adoption
Interventions should be systemic  calls for attention to
linkages among the pillars  in turn calls for partnership
and institutional mechanisms for working in this mode
Innovation Systems (IS) and Partnerships
The concept of Innovation Systems traces its roots
to the search for an analytical framework to explain
patterns of industrial growth in Japan, Europe and
East Asia in the 1980s
 Success of industrial economies was catalysed by
effective “national systems of innovation”—networks of
groups and individuals who worked in institutional
environments that promoted sharing of knowledge and
learning.
 Innovations rather than research investments per se
were key to economic growth
 Innovation was a social process of interacting and
learning—i.e. partnership was essential to innovation
But what is innovation?
• Innovation is the process of :
 of creating and putting into use combinations of
knowledge from different/multiple sources to create
development impact
 obtaining commercial value from inventions
• Research creates knowledge and technology; the
process of innovation goes further to include putting
that knowledge into use
• Innovating involves multiple actors working together
as elements of the same system
Innovation System
An innovation system comprises

Organisations, enterprises and individuals that
together demand and supply knowledge and
technology, and

The rules and mechanisms by which these actors
interact
• The IS concept is a framework for analysing the roles and
interaction of actors in a system (e.g. an agricultural
development system) in order to generate innovations
(institutional, policy technological) that lead to
development outcomes
• Has proven its value in industrialised countries 
credible premise for building/strengthening partnerships
Elements of an Agricultural IS
Demand domain
• Consumers of agricultural products
• Policy makers
Research domain
Enterprise domain
Users of codified
knowledge, producers
of tacit knowledge
Farmers, agroindustries and dealers,
transporters
Intermediary domain
Service providers and
intermediaries
NGOs, extension
services, farmer and
trade associations,
donors
Producers of mainly
codified knowledge
NARS, IARCs,
Universities and tertiary
colleges, private
research organisations
Support structures
Banking and financial system, transport and marketing
infrastructure, education system and professional networks
Example of an Agricultural Innovation System
Practitioners
Rural
communities
Market value
chains
Policy makers
Researchers
Innovation platform
The linkages are just as important as the actors
Capacity and
competence of
actors and
institutions in
Project cycle
Evidence based
Methodologies
and approaches to
deliver impact
Institutional
policies that
enable delivery of
benefits to actors
How does innovation take place?
• Entrepreneurs and others identify an opportunity or
a threat
• Form alliances (partnerships) to access new ideas,
resources or markets and learn from each other.
• Reconfigure patterns of alliance when
opportunities or threats change.
• A process self organisation of different players to
access and put knowledge into use – organising for
innovation
• Learning by doing helps build the capacity for self
organisation.
What prevents innovation in the real world?
Lack of self-organisation by the key actors is the
main impediment to Innovation. This is in turn
attributed to:
• High risks, weak incentives & highly
dynamic contexts
• Existing institutional arrangements
discourage self-organisation
• Mistrust by potential actors
• Isolation by key players e.g. research
• Weaknesses and lack of organisation
by potential key players e.g. private
sector
Lessons from Bank Projects
•
Support to research institutions (WARDA, CORAF, ASRECA , FARA,
NARI, etc.) and RMCS to implementation to generate knowledge and
improved technologies and innovations (project and programs)
•
Most of the projects/programs have R & D (Action-Research)
components in projects, which has generated knowledge and
innovations: But Difficulties in scaling –up: Example of the NERICA
Rice variety with higher yields, shorter growth cycles and more
protein than Asian and African parents.
•
Need to work closely with poor farmers and development partners to
conduct research for development : innovation networks, platforms &
alliance creation and capacity building at all levels (farmers, policy
makers, and research institutions etc.) for advocacy to increase the
sharing and the use of research results
•
Cape Verde: Santiago Island watershed management and
rehabilitation project: Construction and rehabilitation of irrigation
infrastructure (dikes and canals using farmers associations has led to
rehabilitation of degraded ecosystems and sustainable agricultural
development using improved farmers knowledge and practices:
Replicable project in island countries in arid zones
Issues for further discussion
• Enhancing the innovation capacity for African
agricultural development

Knowledge base on best practices for agricultural innovation

Projects leveraging innovation systems methods as pathways
for impact

Innovations and best practices both within and outside the
Bank pertinent to RMCs development agenda and put into
productive use with support of Africa Development Partners
• Synthesis and sharing of lessons
and experiences from comparable
institutions (e.g. World Bank)—
concerted action to avoid reinventing the wheel
Thank you
for the
attention