Agriculture

This booklet present several stories of women in rural Bangladesh and Nepal who are making positive changes in their communities. The stories have been collected from a variety of projects WorldFish has been implementing over the past nine years with support from partners and donors. These inspirational women have undertaken new agriculture-aquaculture livelihood opportunities to better their lives and those of their family members. To get where they are now, these women have had to overcome many challenges.

Development policy increasingly focuses on building capacities to respond to change (adaptation), and to drive change (innovation). Few studies, however, focus specifically on the social and gender differentiation of capacities to adapt and innovate. We address this gap using a qualitative study in three communities in Solomon Islands; a developing country, where rural livelihoods and well-being are tightly tied to agriculture and fisheries. We find the five dimensions of capacity to adapt and to innovate (i.e.

Whether grown for sale or for on-farm consumption, vegetables and other crops are often managed as stand-alone, monoculture enterprises. Integrated farming can help improve the nutrient output-input balance sheet and efficiency, not only for each component, but for the whole farm agroecosystem. Quantitative methods that can assist farmers and researchers improve diversified and integrated natural resources management systems are emerging from the agricultural and ecological sciences.

Concept of sustainability in relation to agricultural systems is discussed.

Reorienting food systems towards improving nutrition outcomes is vital if the global goal of ending all forms of malnutrition is to be achieved. Crucial to transitioning to nutrition-sensitive agriculture is valuing and measuring nutritional quality of the outputs of agricultural production. We review existing indicators which capture an element of nutritional quality applicable to different stages of the food and nutrition system. Applying relevant indicators from the agricultural production stage to selected aquaculture systems, we compare and contrast their strengths and limitations.

This manual was written as part of the Integrated Research in Development for Improved Livelihoods Programme in Northern Province, Zambia (IRDLP) and is primarily intended for extension agents to use with smallholder farmers engaged in semi-intensive fish farming in Northern Zambia. The IRDLP is an Irish Aid-funded project implemented by WorldFish, Harvest Plus and the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).

Innovation platforms are fast becoming part of the mantra of agricultural research for development projects and programmes. Their basic tenet is that stakeholders depend on one another to achieve agricultural development outcomes, and hence need a space where they can learn, negotiate and coordinate to overcome challenges and capture opportunities through a facilitated innovation process.

The authors studied how the failure to take into account gendered roles in the management of a communal pasture in the highlands of Ethiopia can affect the resilience of this social-ecological system. This paper integrates resilience analysis and gender analysis, to increase our understanding of processes that may undermine the ability of a social-ecological system to cope with, to adapt to, and to shape change.

Innovation Platforms are an increasingly popular approach to enhancing multi-stakeholder collaboration in agricultural research for development (AR4D) programmes. Innovation Platforms facilitate interaction and collaboration within and between networks of farmers, governmental and non-governmental service providers, policymakers, researchers, private sector players, and other stakeholders in the agricultural system.

The ability of development interventions to catalyse and support innovation for—and by— women and men is undermined by lack of specific understanding about how gender norms interact with gender relations and what this means for innovation. This is also the case for Bangladesh despite substantive research and development investments in the past decade that have placed emphasis on gender norms, particularly those inhibiting women and girl’s education, women and girl’s health, and women’s economic empowerment.