Why some approaches and technologies are not moving beyond early adopters

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[…]

Why we must assess knowledge uptake in agriculture and rural development

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[…]

African agriculture is witnessing a shift from physical to value chain collateral

While African financial institutions are still stuck with traditional banking models invented in the West, African agricultural value chains have shifted in ways that threaten to render banks irrelevant to agriculture.  Rural and agricultural finance modeling is being forced to consider value chain collateral and the existence of a market as opposed to physical forms Read more about African agriculture is witnessing a shift from physical to value chain collateral[…]