Many people who grew up in African communities practicing mixed farming, remember how taming young bulls or steers into a span of oxen was not easy. The situation was the same with taming a cow to milk it when it had just given birth to its first calf. In most cases you would not complete Read more about Taming agricultural value chains through data and evidence[…]
The majority of African economies are too complex to be fully exploited through current formal education systems that promote silos. While it is important to have expertise in crop production, livestock production, nutrition, road construction and natural resources management, what matters is how all these forms of knowledge can be integrated into a cohesive system. Read more about It will take integrative thinkers to fully exploit African resources[…]
They may not advertise their products in the formal media, but informal agricultural traders have results-driven ways of capturing customer loyalty. Most of their skills have been honed over generations into unwritten intuitive laws that almost every trader is aware of. They understand customers more than customers know about themselves. According to traders in Harare Read more about How informal agricultural traders capture and preserve customer loyalty[…]
‘Best practice’ is not even a mouthful but what it means in practice remains unclear to many people who use the phrase. In African agriculture, it takes a lot for a farmer or trader to become a best practitioner. Most value chain actors face challenges in identifying sufficient quality evidence that can be translated into Read more about How to move from ordinary to best agricultural practices[…]
In every African community you can find people who are naturally curious and those who lack interest in learning. Those who are curious can describe many aspects of their local environment such as natural resources and man-made features like water sources, dip tanks, schools, markets and business centres as well as the history of their Read more about The power of curiosity and situational intelligence in African communities[…]
Many well-intentioned organisations and people are being frustrated by the shortcomings of using case studies, most significant change stories and conference presentations in spreading success from one African community to another. Most reports produced by several consultants are not making a difference due to multiple reasons (known and unknown). On the other hand, more than Read more about Limitations of using documents and reports to share knowledge in Africa[…]
A lot can be learnt from remarkable ways through which African socio-cultural systems generated and shared knowledge. There were reliable conduits for sharing knowledge from one age group to another, one gender to another and one society to another. Besides respected knowledge brokers, each community had sense making tools linking different communities of practice. Some Read more about Why some approaches and technologies are not moving beyond early adopters[…]
Many developing countries are witnessing trends where indigenous knowledge systems are transforming to a commercial stage. This is exposing the myth that indigenous knowledge can remain pure and undiluted in the current rapidly globalizing world. The modern economy forces farmers, traders and other economic actors to contribute knowledge to their socio-economic networks. Every farmer or Read more about From farmers and traders to knowledge artisans[…]
There are many reasons why developing countries suffer from a severe mismatch between knowledge supply and demand. Less than 20% of knowledge in African countries has been documented. Besides driving policy and economic development, such knowledge is trying to influence the 80% tacit knowledge which is undocumented. While computerisation and digital technology are expanding in Read more about How can we build equilibrium knowledge ecosystems in developing countries?[…]
While a lot of resources have gone into producing and pushing information to farmers and rural people, there has not been enough effort into understanding the uptake and utilization of all this information. Barriers and enabling factors to knowledge uptake have not been dealt with. With dwindling resources, the modernisation-driven communication model of pushing information Read more about Why we must assess knowledge uptake in agriculture and rural development[…]