Linking African agricultural universities to research-users through the multistakeholder partnerships: Experience from PAEPARD

Since 2010, the African European Partnerships on Agricultural Research for Development (PAEPARD) is promoting a multi-stakeholder partnership (MSP) approach, involving nonresearch stakeholders, as a new way of co-creating and using knowledge and improving the collaboration among actors in solving the challenges faced by smallholder farmers on the African continent. More than 24 MSP have been created along different value chains across 17 African countries through two brokering mechanisms: open calls and Users’ Led Process (ULP) which is in itself a MSP approach. The MSP has shown advantage of serving as fora in identifying and expressing the real challenges of farmers and offers a space for knowledge co-creation in addressing those challenges and therefore ensuring the sustainability of actions. In this study, we bring out the experience and role played by 4 African agricultural universities engaged in 4 different MSP. These 4 case studies expose the significant role of African Universities in building capacity of non-research stakeholders. Although some European universities are playing a key role in the MSP promoted by PAEPARD they are referred to but not developed in this paper which focusses on African universities’ experience. The purpose of this paper is to stimulate debate and call on African universities - using evidence from the PAEPARD experience - to increase their participation and engagement in MSP and integrate this approach in their research, teaching and outreach for the benefit of African farmers especially smallholder farmers thereby contributing to achieving the AU 2063 Agenda for Change and SDGs.