Overall goal

To assess and learn jointly from recent experiences across Africa about how innovation processes involving multiple stakeholders and types of knowledge operate, in order to identify concrete priorities for research, practice and policy for addressing the needs and demands of smallholders and other rural actors.

Specific objectives

JOLISAA aims to achieve six specific objectives:

1. Incorporate the concepts and approaches related to IS and L/TK into a framework and an operational approach well-suited to assessing systematically and collectively experiences about agricultural innovation across Africa (WP1);
2. Assess in a comparative and collaborative manner a series of carefully selected past and ongoing cases of agricultural innovation involving multiple stakeholder and knowledge sources (WP2);
3. Identify, synthesise and validate collectively the corresponding results, lessons and challenges (WP5);
4. Strengthen the capacities of members of existing innovation platforms in three African countries to assess, learn collectively from and facilitate multistakeholder innovation approaches building on diverse knowledge sources (WP3);
5. Improve local, national and international exchange, learning and networking among diverse stakeholders and constituencies about innovation experiences and approaches (WP4);
6. Propose to the EC, the Forum on Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA) and other interested national and international bodies an itemised, collectively validated agenda for future research, practice and policy related to multistakeholder innovation approaches and L/TK in Africa (WP5).