OAR@ICRISATInnovation platforms as vehicle to strengthen stakeholders capacity to innovate for improved livelihoods in drylands in Asia and Sub Saharan AfricaKShalanderauthorA MWhitbreadauthorK P CRaoauthorAgriculture is the engine for poverty reduction and economic development in the developing nations The sector employs over 50 of the population in South Asia SA and Sub Saharan Africa SSA and contributes significantly to their Gross Domestic Product GDP McCullough Pingali and Stamoulis 2008 Majority of agricultural lands in these regions are drylands and vulnerable to droughts of various intensities These threats are far more pronounced in the semiarid and arid regions Globally drylands occupy some 609 billion ha with a population of 21 billion people nearly half of which are the poorest and most vulnerable and marginalized in the world UN 2013 Despite the importance of dryland agriculture for the livelihood security of millions of rural people the level of innovations and technological change in the sector continues to be slow and patchy Access to and adoption of technologies and innovations remain very low resulting in low productivity resource degradation and persistent poverty Many developing countries are now working towards improving rural livelihoods of smallholder farmers However achieving this goal will require transforming the traditional top down technologydriven extension model to a more decentralized farmerled and marketdriven extension system Innovation has become a focus of dryland agriculture development and innovation systems are the centre piece of many development projects These Innovation systems IS approaches emphasize the collective dimension of innovation pointing to the need to effect necessary linkages and interaction among multiple actors IS thinking also pays attention to the coevolution of innovation processes arguing that successful innovation results from alignment of technical social institutional and organizational dimensions Hall 2005 Hall 2007 These insights are increasingly informing interventions that focus on supporting multistakeholder arrangements such as innovation platforms IPs as mechanisms for enhancing agriculture innovations.Agriculture-Farming, Production, Technology, EconomicsSub-Saharan AfricaDrylands2017ICRISATMonograph

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