Developing capacity for change of students and staff in Higher Education to enhance the potential of innovation in agriculture

There is a compelling need to transform Africa’s agriculture as embodied in the aspirations of the Comprehensive African Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP). To achieve broad-based improvements in agricultural productivity, competitiveness and markets, there must be functional agricultural innovation systems (AIS) to spawn innovations. The AIS perspective recognizes complexity inherent in the agricultural landscape and that the desired changes in the sector are necessarily emergent - the outcome of dynamic interactions among the network of actors. Recognizing patterns of interaction and underlying structures that shape emergent patterns of system behaviour is a precondition to strengthening the AIS. Regional assessments of innovation systems in sub-Saharan Africa were undertaken by the Tropical Agriculture Platform (TAP) and its partner Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA) in 2013. These assessments revealed that although universities and other tertiary agricultural education institutions could and should contribute to agricultural innovation (through research, involvement in policy dialogues and capacity development), they do not fulfil these roles because they are: a) insufficiently connected to local agricultural sector actors, b) lack the resources and capacities to fully operationalize training for agricultural innovation systems (AIS); and c) hardly embed in national innovation strategies which consider the role of and accordingly fund higher education and research. The Tropical Agricultural Platform advocates for more coherent, efficient and coordinated AIS capacity development (CD) interventions that address individual, organisational and institutional capacity needs. This strategy requires improving the capacity of institutes of higher education and research to become active and relevant players in the AIS process. This paper presents the common framework on CD for AIS developed by TAP and points to the relevance of meta-learning and the importance of “functional capacities”, if higher education institutions and their graduates are to become active players in the agricultural innovation system. The Framework was developed through an inclusive, participatory and multi-stakeholders approach with contributions by TAP Partners, including FARA and the Global Conference on Higher Education and Research in Agriculture. The Common Framework consists of a conceptual background document, a synthesis paper and a guidance note on operationalization of the Framework. In January 2016, TAP partners approved this Common Framework which is now being applied in eight countries in Africa (4), Asia (2) and Central America (2) with support of the EU-funded Capacity Development for Agricultural Innovation Systems (CDAIS) project, jointly implemented by AGRINATURA and FAO in collaboration with local partners from 2015 to 2018.