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The JOLISAA project focuses its activities on three sub-regions in sub-Saharan Africa: Eastern, Southern and West Africa, each of them offering specific conditions and experiences with respect to agricultural/rural innovation.

In each region, there is one target country: Kenya, South Africa and Benin, respectively. In each country, the JOLISAA project operates through well-established national partners, who are already actively engaged in developing and understanding innovation systems and the role of L/TK and are keen to strengthen their collaboration with a various other stakeholders. They are respectively:

In Kenya, the Kenyan Agricultural Research Institute (KARI);
in South Africa, the University of Pretoria (UP).
In Benin, the University of Abomey-Calavi (UAC).

Each of these three national partners , in turn, coordinates the implementation of project activities in close coordination and interaction with members of the existing national innovation platforms. While JOLISAA priority will be to develop project activities at the national level, key activities such as case-study development and capacity-strengthening will also involve neighbouring countries, allowing the project to link with and tap into key innovation experiences, institutions and resource persons, complementary to what can be done in the three target countries.

These countries were selected for three main reasons:

taken together, they cover a wide range of socio-economic and agro-environmental conditions illustrating the diversity found across Africa;
in each of them, the project can engage with, and support, one or several existing platforms where diverse stakeholders already actively discuss, exchange and collaborate to facilitate agricultural/rural innovation and to strengthen related capacities at local, sub-national or national level; and
each of them has a rich and relatively long trajectory of past and ongoing experiences with multistakeholder processes of agricultural/rural innovation, many of them at least partly documented, thus allowing a good basis for conducting rich inventories and case studies within a relatively short time.

The type of stakeholders engaged in the existing national platforms varies from country to country, but they usually bring together representatives of universities, agricultural research institutions, extension services, the private sector, farmer organisations and NGOs/CSOs (civil-society organisations). In the South African case, for example, existing networks with which the project will engage include the National Agricultural Research for Development Task Team, the Prolinnova–South Africa network and the South African Society for Agriculture and Extension (see details about each target country in the WP4 description).