Agricultural Innovation platforms as a best practice for farmers

The Author highlights the role of Innovation platforms as spaces that bring together heterogeneous actors to tackle challenges or harness opportunities at various levels, Innovation platforms can be used to explore strategies that can boost productivity, manage natural resources, improve value chains, and adapt to climate change. For smallholder farmers, these platforms remain key in the adoption and diffusion of technologies, however the author notes that they act as space for facilitating change, learning and creating networks and linkages that harness the interests of the actors. Acknowledging that they are new and unfamiliar to smallholder farmers, the membership, participation, funding, coordination and collaboration remain a challenge however immense opportunities are prevalent with continued awareness, capacity and sensitization within the farmer groups and communities as highlighted by the author.