This paper is a synthesis of research undertaken as part of the Research Into Use programme (RIU) to explore the question of how agricultural research can be used more effectively to improve agricultural production and farmers' livelihoods in developing countries. Many of the challenges the...

The recognition that innovation occurs in networks of heterogeneous actors and requires broad systemic support beyond knowledge brokering has resulted in a changing landscape of the intermediary domain in an increasingly market-driven agricultural sector in developing countries. This paper...

This paper reflects on the experience of the Research Into Use (RIU) projects in Asia. It reconfirms much of what has been known for many years about the way innovation takes place and finds that many of the shortcomings of RIU in Asia were precisely because lessons from previous research on...

Descriptive and logit analysis were employed to investigate the impact of social, economic and technical factors on decisions to adopt new agricultural technologies in the Ada and Selale districts of Ethiopia. Peasants follow sequential adoption of technologies. In both study areas, priority is...

Stochastic frontier production function analysis was performed to examine relative crop and milk production efficiency among peasants in Ada and Selale districts of the Central highlands of Ethiopia. The results indicate that Ada farmers exhibit relatively higher efficiency scores in cereal...

Radical changes took place with respect to several agricultural policies in Ethiopia in 1990-91. Different agricultural technologies were being delivered by several international agencies. Shifts in government policies and technological intervention would induce changes in the production...

An aggregate measure of production efficiency involving crop and livestock enterprises is examined in the Selale and Ada regions of Ethiopia using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). In general, farmers in regions more suitable to crop production (Ada) tend to attain higher production efficiency...

The question of how agricultural research can best be used for developmental purposes is a topic of some debate in developmental circles. The idea that this is simply a question of better transfer of ideas from research to farmers has been largely discredited. Agricultural innovation is a...

We exploit plot data from the agricultural module of the third Malawi Integrated Household Survey (IHS-3) to investigate how organic cultivation techniques contribute to productivity of non-subsidized local maize and what to expect from using organic inputs on a larger scale. We approximate...