Doing things differently: Post-harvest innovation learning alliances in Tanzania and Zimbabwe

Conventional approaches to technology transfer within small-scale farming systems have frequently failed. Household food security remains precarious for many smallholder farmers, and food production levels show little or no increase. Post-harvest service provision and research have focused on technology development, with less attention being given to understanding delivery-system constraints, to distinguishing between the needs and priorities of different households or to exploring farmers’ own research capabilities. Recent approaches to scaling up technologies – both products and processes – point to the dependence of up-scaling on the activities and interactions of a diversity of key players and organizations, all together referred to as the innovation system (see Figure 12.1) (Arnold and Bell, 2001; Hall et al, 2003; Lundy et al, 2004). Here, institutional arrangements (or institutions) refer to ‘the mechanisms, rules and customs by which people and organizations interact with each other’ (North, 1990). The key challenge to effecting impact is perceived less in terms of devising new technologies – doing different things – and more in terms of improving the working of the innovation system – doing things differently – to overcome institutional constraints. Translating ideas into social and economic use requires appropriate technologies (hardware innovation), compatible mindsets (software innovation) and favourable institutional settings (system-ware innovation)