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How to move from ordinary to best agricultural practices
‘Best practice’ is not even a mouthful but what it means in practice remains unclear to many people who use…
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Why the elite should stop imposing their expectations on smallholder farmers
Bankers expect smallholder farmers to repay loans at a particular interest. For economists, African smallholder farmers are supposed to master…
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The power of curiosity and situational intelligence in African communities
In every African community you can find people who are naturally curious and those who lack interest in learning. Those…
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Many African farmers can perform like Gold Medalists
If agriculture was an Olympics competition, many African farmers would certainly be gold medalists. Zephaniah Phiri, the late world class…
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Limitations of using documents and reports to share knowledge in Africa
Many well-intentioned organisations and people are being frustrated by the shortcomings of using case studies, most significant change stories and…
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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…
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From farmers and traders to knowledge artisans
Many developing countries are witnessing trends where indigenous knowledge systems are transforming to a commercial stage. This is exposing the…
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How can we build equilibrium knowledge ecosystems in developing countries?
There are many reasons why developing countries suffer from a severe mismatch between knowledge supply and demand. Less than 20%…
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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…
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How can we measure the cost of lost knowledge in the agriculture sector?
One of the enduring challenges in African agriculture is defining effective metrics to measure the value of knowledge. In most…
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From individual rewards to community incentives
Socio-economic challenges facing many developing countries are revealing the shortcomings of rewarding individual performance. Most problems have become so complex…
