Rural innovation systems: introduction

Multi-stakeholder innovation for rural livelihoods

KIT's Development, Policy & Practice Department emphasizes local economic development through its Sustainable Economic Development programme. Chain development, local governance and rural innovation are key components of the programme.
 

1. Introduction
Innovation, which is commonly defined as a beneficial change of practices and processes, is necessary to improve agricultural productivity, profitability and sustainability. For many years support for innovation focused mainly on strengthening agricultural research with little attention given to other relevant actors (i.e. farmers’ organizations and private companies) or to addressing institutional weaknesses that hamper effective innovation.

It is increasingly understood that innovation is the result of interaction among actors (rather than purely a result of research) and for this reason it is important to involve, not only farmers’ organizations but also private companies, and even policy-makers, as full-fledged partners in enhancing rural innovation. However, so far there is insufficient understanding of the dynamics and conditions for the success of multi-stakeholder interaction particularly in the diverse socio-ecological settings in Sub-Saharan Africa.
 

2. Approach

The overall objective of the Enhancing Rural Innovation programme is to improve rural people’s livelihoods by enhancing multi-stakeholder processes for innovation through institutional development and capacity strengthening of the stakeholders involved. Specific objectives include:

• Knowledge is generated on the conditions in Sub-Saharan Africa in which stakeholder configurations are effective drivers of rural innovation, become socially inclusive, and add economic value as well as improve sustainable rural livelihoods of the poorest people;
• The capacities of the different stakeholders – particularly of producer organizations and service providers – are strengthened to fully seize new opportunities for rural innovation; and,
• The institutional dynamics are facilitated for stakeholder configurations and interactions to enhance rural innovation.
   

3. Research
Research activities will be organized around five themes and will lead to the development of evidence-based tools and methods that can be used to strengthen interaction amongst stakeholders.

• Stakeholder configurations for rural innovation:
  What do these institutional links and partnerships ideally look like?
  What are the results? What are conditions for success and failure? What are the implications for rural innovation policies and enabling environment.
• Capacity strengthening of stakeholders:
  How can farmers successfully join in a partnership if there is no organization capable of representing their interests? How can private entrepreneurs contribute to rural innovation if their organizations are not set for research for development? How can researchers and their organizations contribute?
• Facilitating and enabling stakeholder configurations for rural innovation:
  What are alternative funding mechanisms to the current competitive-based funding mechanisms to include strengthening people’s capacities? How to balance the costs and benefits in such a way that overhead remains limited? How to enhance better feedback mechanisms between the representing agents and their basis? How to arrive at a true collective learning? What is the role of local governments?
• Enhancing social inclusion in rural innovation systems:
  What are the circumstances under which innovation remains socially inclusive as well as profitable and sustainable? How to improve the livelihoods of those farmers who are not yet important stakeholders in a supply or value chain?
• Monitoring & Evaluation in rural innovation systems:
  What indicators can be used to assess both performance and learning by stakeholders? How can these indicators be defined in a participatory and multi-stakeholder process?
   

4. Services
KIT provides facilitation, action-research, training and advisory services for:

• Strengthening decentralized, pluralistic agricultural research, advisory and training service systems;
• Developing public-private partnerships for agricultural knowledge service provision;
• Learning through improved interaction between stakeholders for collective action;
• Monitoring and evaluation of rural innovation systems;
• Empowerment of farmers’ organizations for rural innovation;
• Enhanced client-orientation and performance management of agricultural research and advisory services;
• Capacity strengthening of stakeholders for Integrated Agricultural Research for Development;
• Designing multi-stakeholder-driven funding mechanisms for agricultural innovation; and
• Supporting change management in agricultural research and advisory organizations.