Discussion paper 06

Gender and agricultural innovation: revisiting the debate through an innovations systems perspective Author: Ann Kingiri October 2010 (PDF 350KB)

Summary
This is a review of main arguments in literature around gender and innovation (in relation to RIU objectives) with a view to providing examples of how to engender agricultural innovation systems and draw lessons for policy from this example.

This paper focuses on the current debates around the interface between gender and innovation and attempts to integrate gender perspectives into the four-point analytical framework developed by the World Bank to investigate agricultural innovation capacity (World Bank, 2006). This framework is current and suitable for analysing innovation through a gender lens because of its emphasis on institutions and actors that create "engendered" patterns of interaction. It next uses this expanded framework to analyse how innovation has been engendered and what the implications have been for putting agricultural research into use. The analysis is informed by secondary and primary data. The latter has been solicited from selected activities under the RIU Africa country programmes.

Preliminary analysis of secondary material suggests that while agricultural innovation has not been gender-blind, the approaches applied for gender analysis have been weak. This may have had a negative impact on implementation of policies that seek to engender innovation capacity.