Advances in Africa agriculture is contingent on the volume of technologies that is available for use in the sector. Apparently, the same condition was responsible for the agricultural transformation and food sufficiency in the advanced world. Every development in the history of mankind is orchestrated by technological revolutions; more specifically when technologies meets up with felt needs and social political will for change. The precarious state of Africa agriculture seems to have attain this threshold of pain more than a decade ago and triggered the action of different organization and pollical structures through the Africa Union Commission. The development of the Comprehensive Africa Agricultural Development Program (CAADP) in 1994. The CAADP ideal proposed a budgetary allocation of 10% at the country level to agricultural sector in order to yield six percent annual growth on the average. A key pillar of the earlier days of CAADP subscription by the countries was the pillar four which stood for actions around technology generation, dissemination and adoption. This was led by the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa and its stakeholders, FARA thus took the pillar 4 action as its focus for contributing to the transformation of Africa agriculture. The efforts yielded ample attention to technology generations across board, and series of technology testing actions in several pilots. Some of the technologies have potentials and a handful also stood at bay requiring further development to yield the desired outputs.
Despite the efforts into technology generation, introduction, adaptation etc. the agricultural sector development only experiences a slight move and it seems to plateau suggesting that other actions are required to sustain the growth of the sector. A more recent effort at the continental level is the commitment of the head of state in Malabo, to sustain the CAADP momentum. The Malabo declaration came up with various targets including the doubling of the Total factor productivity by 2025 as well as eradicating hunger among others. Attaining these targets will be elusive without a firm commitment to technology generations, dissemination and adoption in a very systematic way. FARA has developed the Science Agenda for Africa Agriculture (S3A) to fast-track the broad contribution of science to deliver technologies and knowledge to ensure the delivery of agricultural growth and transformation. The S3A has four thematic focus and there cross cutting area, this is currently getting grounded at the country level with the expectation of yielding sustainable broad based socioeconomic benefit from the agricultural sector. In addition to these efforts, the need to bring existing and upcoming technologies to scale has been highlighted broadly by policy makers and development practitioners in Africa. This felt need came along with the mantra that Africa have a lot of technologies on the shelve that are yet to be translated to socio economic benefit for the stakeholders in the sector. Whether this is factual or not, Africa agriculture requires a systematic way of bringing technologies with very high potentials to scale. This book aims to bridge this gap in knowledge, by reviewing the existing knowledge on scaling technologies and innovation. It provides a comprehensive review of knowledge and systematically propose various strategies to ensure that agricultural technologies are scaled up and scaled out for mega social and economic benefits.
The book contains seven chapters that exhaustively covers the subject matter and make a smart proposition on the plausible pathway to ensure that agricultural technologies delivers a vibrant and economically sustainable agrarian sector.