Innovation systems perspectives: Institutional change to strengthen agricultural tertiary education in Sub-saharan Africa

The changing face of African agriculture in the wake of myriad global, regional and local challenges requires adjustments in agricultural capacity development. Universities are better placed to spearhead this change but they too need to adjust the architecture of their programmes. This paper examines the ongoing evolution of the organizational architecture of agricultural tertiary education in Africa. In line with the vision of the Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture (RUFORUM), this institutional realignment will erase the long held negative image of universities as backwater populated by egotistic academicians and bureaucratic administrators. The African university is poised to be explicitly positioned in the global knowledge arena as a facilitator of agricultural innovation, technology, institutions and development. A systems perspective is used to explore these possibilities based on experiences from RUFORUM. The paper concludes that the conception of an innovative capacity building programme in Africa must go hand in hand with associated efforts to create a coordinated, multilayered, supra-scale institutional arrangement cognizant of agricultural policy and local contexts. It is suggested that regional, national and local characteristics and differences must come to the fore in the design of demand-driven agricultural tertiary education and training programmes.