Increasing attention is being given to indigenous innovation in agriculture - the process by which farmers develop new and better ways of doing things, primarily using local resources and on their own initiative, without pressure or direct support from formal research or development agents. In...

Local innovation refers to the dynamics of IK - the knowledge that grows within a social group, incorporating learning from own experience over generations but also knowledge gained from other sources and fully internalized within local ways of thinking and doing. Local innovation is the process...

Client feedback surveys in Africa indicate that the Bank's performance requires strengthening with regard to (a) respect for local cultures, (b) adaptation of knowledge to the local context and (c) incorporation of local knowledge into development efforts. They would like to see greater...

In the mid-1990s, various organizations concerned with agricultural development in northern Ghana sought ways to promote joint research, extension, advocacy and learning with farmers as equal partners. They were disillusioned with the conventional agricultural modernization and transfer-of...

Malawi remains one of the world's least developed countries, with more than 65 percent of its population of over 11 million below the poverty line. As in most countries in the region, biomedical health facilities and services are in very short supply, especially in the rural communities of...

When the Arid Region Institute (Institut des R??gions Arides, IRA) in M??denine, Tunisia, set out to seek the dynamics of IK in marginal rural areas of central and southern Tunisia, it discovered a large number of farmers -both men and women-who were developing their own innovations without the...

Indigenous knowledge and local initiatives are usually documented and disseminated by outsiders, who make their own interpretations in the process. Participatory Video (PV) provides an opportunity for rural people to document their own knowledge and experiences and to express their wants and...

This note discusses about six farmer innovators from Ethiopia that took part in the recent international workshop on Promoting Local Innovation (PROLINNOVA), which was held in March 2004 at the Furra Institute of Development Studies in Yirgalem, Southern Ethiopia. Over 60 participants from...

Knowledge can be classified into (i) explicit, which can be easily recorded (e.g., books) and (ii) tacit, which cannot be always articulated. However, much of this tacit knowledge can be shared. The conversion of tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge is called externalization. Farmers possess...

During the workshop organized by traditional healers at the XIIIth International HIV/AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa in July 2000, the issue of the legal recognition and the legal status of this ancestral form of healing was once again discussed. The healers underlined the important role...