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Key factors contributing to success
The case studies demonstrated that successful multiple stakeholder approaches are dependent
on a wide range of facilitating and inhibiting factors. Enabling public policies and regulations,
including deregulation of markets, whilst ensuring competition and compliance with minimum
standards often provide a solid foundation. The creation of a network of stakeholder groups
drawn from both public and private sectors is a prerequisite. Such groups need to have the
capacity, capability and willingness to interact and work together in an environment that
encourages cooperation, builds trust and establishes a common vision for the future. The
establishment and participation of effective and representative farmer organisations able and
willing to communicate with members is vital. In most cases this required support and capacity
development.
Clearly, improved infrastructure, particularly roads, communication and power provide the
basis for ensuring inputs can be made available at affordable prices and outputs delivered to
market. This was often a precursor in seeking opportunity to add value along market chains.
Although research can be an important component, it is often not the central one, and in the
early stages, interventions to build capacity, access and use existing knowledge, and foster
learning are required. Easy and timely access to inputs, including finance, is crucial and needs
to be based on effective and competitive marketing, whether domestic or export, and to
address social and environmental concerns.
Looking to the future
As Africa faces the challenge of creating favourable conditions to enable the innovation required
to stimulate poverty reduction and agricultural growth, the context for this is changing. Increasing
population, rapid urbanisation, land resource degradation, climate change and the present
disarray in world commodity markets pose serious challenges. Global integration of many
agricultural supply chains is placing increasing control in the hands of large retailers, processors
and exporters, whose compliance conditions are often difficult for smallholder farmers.
Interventions to encourage innovation depend on the initial context and how this changes over
time. Interventions should not primarily focus on developing research capacity, but should be
developed from the outset in a way that encourages interaction between public, private, NGO
and civil society organisations. Key elements include:
Building and supporting partnerships
• Engagement and collaboration between stakeholders is a pre-requisite that requires
awareness raising, development of trust, a willingness to work together, and creation of a
shared vision for the future.
• Facilitating or brokering alliances is critical and incurs an indispensable and unavoidable
cost that is often overlooked. Such alliances also require ‘champions’: either individuals or
institutions, which understand the often-complex institutional and regulatory structures
that underpin, encourage and support the building of networks.
6 Agricultural Innovation in Sub-Saharan Africa