A manual by Pamela Pali and Kees Swaans on ‘Guidelines for innovation platforms: Facilitation, monitoring and evaluation’ was recently published by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI).

Innovation platforms have recently gained ground as a mechanism to help stimulate and support multi stakeholder collaboration in agricultural research for development. Generally, they are a mechanism to enhance communication and innovation capacity among mutually dependent actors, by improving interactions, coordination and coherence among all actors to facilitate learning and contribute to production and use of knowledge. It is anticipated that bringing different type of actors from the innovation system together for sharing experiences, knowledge, skills, ideas and resources contributes to economic gains through improved productivity and services by creating an enabling environment (i.e. supportive institutions and policies).

Prepared for a project on ‘sustainable management of globally significant endemic ruminant livestock of West Africa’ (PROGEBE), the manual draws on experiences in Guinea, Mali, Senegal and The Gambia.

More reports from the PROGEBE project