Multi-Stakeholder Partnerships for enhancing agricultural research for development (ARD) to impact process

Abstract

Africa lags behind other regions in development indicators partly because it has not sufficiently harnessed the power of science and technology which are demonstrated to be the fundamental enablers of development. In African agriculture, the effort invested in the generation of technologies has not produced the expected outcomes in terms of improved food security, job creation, incomes, etc largely because adoption falls short of the levels necessary to bring about transformation. Resolving this discrepancy is a necessary condition for leveraging science and technology to drive the continent’s agricultural development. Over the past two decades several initiatives to address this challenge have been commissioned. They established that underlying this challenge is the oversimplification of the complexity of the processes from research to adoption and subsequently the realisation of the outcomes and impact of adoption. The simplification entailed structuring the process linearly with extension standing between research and the end-users. This for example limited the engagement between research and the end users. The linear construct also stretched out the lag between research and the application of its outputs.