Rationale

Agricultural technologies in Africa are most often only taken up locally.  There is therefore an urgent need to accelerate adoption and widen dissemination by facilitating learning among different actors in the value chains.  FARA has a comparative advantage in advancing the development of innovation platforms supported not just by end-users but by potential investors in innovations that extend beyond sub-regional boundaries.  The Secretariat is coordinating the six-year (2007-2013) AfDB-funded DONATA project to accelerate the dissemination of agricultural technologies across the region.

Objectives

DONATA’s purpose is to capture relevant lessons and develop effective trans-boundary partnerships and investments for the dissemination of high-potential technologies.  The success of DONATA is critical to restore and maintain confidence in agricultural research.  DONATA's initial portfolio is made up of products of formal research.  However, technologies selected from a growing numbers of innovations by African farmers will also be included. Presently, the implementation of the project is coordinated from both FARA secretariat’s and SROs platform. As the SROs fully internalize field implementation and effective data/knowledge sharing involving such a continental project, the coordination responsibility will be gradually devolved to the SROs  whereas the will retain the data/experience/knowledge gathering, analysis and sharing responsibility through digital knowledge management system.      

Exit Strategy

It is anticipated that the SROs would have developed the necessary capacity and have internalized the process of coordinating a continental project with the responsibility to retrieve, store and share data and knowledge with participants in the project through the FARA secretariat during the life of the current AfDB funding. Accordingly, the Secretariat will devolve the coordination responsibility of future phases of DONATA to the SROs but use its digital knowledge management system, especially the RAILS platform, to retrieve, process and share information and lessons learned with the larger forum members and international development audience