Transformative Capacity Strengthening and Integration

This investment area focuses on strengthening and integration of different types of AR4D capacities and competencies at systemic, organizational and individual levels to support and contribute significantly to the attainment of inclusive and sustainable agricultural transformation in the ECA member States.

The strategic result areas required to deliver this investment include:

1. Strengthen and integrate capacities and competencies for inclusive stakeholder engagement, strategic visioning and policy formulation;
2. Strengthen and integrate capacities and competencies for generation, access and utilization of agricultural knowledge and information; and
3. Strengthen and integrate capacities and competencies for effective institutional development, management and performance monitoring and evaluation.

Some of the major challenges stated in the opportunity format, that investments in this area shall address include:

• Institutionalizing and catalyzing strategic capacity strengthening partnerships to address AR4D capacity needs in the ECA sub region.
• Responding to organizational development capacity strengthening needs of NARS with special attention to the weaker NARIs.
• Strengthening capacity for establishing enabling environment for AR4D to support agricultural transformation.
• Strengthening capacity for effective organizational management, governance and performance assessment.
• Building sustainable capacity to build capacity so as to create a sustainable AR4D capacity in the ECA sub region.
• Supporting the integration of research-based learning outputs into the curricula of institutions of higher learning to support capacity development.
• Strengthening capacity for developing and repackaging of cost-effective training materials, approaches and delivery mechanisms including the use of the revolutionary ICT technologies.
• Strengthening capacity for changing mindset and focus of agricultural policy makers, planners, institutional/research leaders, managers, researchers and agricultural practitioners.
• Strengthening capacity on formation and management of successful and value adding partnerships, strategic alliances and collaborations.
• Supporting training and retention of adequate research scientists and technical support staff particularly in the weak NARIs and in specialized fields.
• Strengthening capacity for researchers and extension personnel in communication and promotion of uptake and scaling up of technologies and innovations.
• Strengthening capacities for collection and sharing of knowledge, information and experiences for informed decision making.
• Improving leverage of the existing AR4D capacities to get more done with the available capacities while working on long term improvement of capacities.
• Developing need-based and functional capacity monitoring and evaluation system for tracking the outcomes and impact of capacity development initiatives.