Components

At RIU's core is a portfolio of experiments in which different approaches to enabling innovation are being tested in different contexts and settings. These experiments can be grouped into four main clusters:

• African Country Programmes
  RIU has established six Africa country programmes: in the east Rwanda and Tanzania, Malawi and Zambia in the south, and in the west Nigeria and Sierra Leone. The rationale of these programmes is that currently mechanisms to articulate the demand for research and other information are poorly developed. The country programmes are therefore experimenting with a variety of networking approaches to establish better linkages between the research, entrepreneurial, policy and farming communities with a view to strengthening innovation capacity.
• Asia programme
  A number of projects located in South Asia, selected through a competitive call, aimed at developing new partnerships to take advantage of clusters of research products from the RNRRS. We anticipated that with RIU support these could result in significant scaling up of technologies, practices and policies. The projects are clustered into two groups:
  • innovation in the value chain
  • scaling up of natural resource management research products
• RIU Best Bets
  Funding is being provided to a number of large-scale technology promotion activities, selected through an innovative competitive process. Selected activities are anticipated to achieve impact at scale through private sector involvement.
• Commissioned work
  In addition to its main programmes, from time to time RIU commissions additional pieces of work which complement and add value to these main thrusts.
• Impact
  RIU is in the process of finalising its revised approach to impact monitoring and evaluation.
• RNRRS legacy
  This includes repackaging of selected research products developed during the RNRRS, especially through the development of RIU's Natural Resources Knowledge Database and various approaches to communicating selected RNRRS research products to potential users.