DeSIRA CONNECT Days: Western Africa, Central Africa & Madagascar

1. The workshop discussion groups fostered participant interaction, leading to consistent conclusions about DeSIRA projects despite differing contexts and goals.
2. Common features included multi-stakeholder collaboration, bottom-up approaches, and inclusiveness, reflecting themes from previous Connect Days and the coherence of the DeSIRA initiative.
3. Participants shared insights from project implementation, formulating recommendations for effective multi-stakeholder innovation platforms. Key suggestions included clarifying roles and budget allocations, aiming for win-win situations, planning for sustainability with local authorities, ensuring quality facilitation, leveraging existing mechanisms, and engaging key actors early.
4. The discussion on scaling DeSIRA innovations emphasized community and policymaker ownership, illustrating the benefits of multi-stakeholder approaches.
5. An agrifood systems perspective prompted further reflection on scaling related to food transformation, marketing, distribution, and consumption, which several DeSIRA projects address.
6. The need for stronger support and intermediation services – such as innovation facilitators and extension – was highlighted as crucial for scaling innovation. Such support should be further professionalized to provide job opportunities through training paths and education curricula and stronger organisations.
7. Funding discussions raised awareness of the differences between public goods and innovations requiring public action versus market-driven innovations that can scale through business models using blended funding.
8. Ensuring connections from local to continental levels is vital for aligning innovations with broader agendas. Research plays a key role in generating, collecting, and analyzing data to support innovation communities and policymakers.

The DeSIRA CONNECT Days Western Africa, Central Africa & Madagascar were held on September 24,25 and 26 in Accra, Ghana

Purpose of the CONNECT Days

This event aimed to share the lessons learned in the implementation of DeSIRA projects and to identify the conditions for continuing their innovation trajectories.

To this end, the event was anticipated to offer three types of activities:

• a project fair with individual booths to promote and discuss your projects,
• inter-project thematic workshops to learn together from the implementation of DeSIRA, and
• round tables with other stakeholders aimed at continuing the innovation trajectories of projects.

Each activity was designed to feed into the others.

• LIDISKI
• DeSIRA-LIFT Learning Reviews – A. Toillier

• SE4D – A. Egeru – RUFORUM
• DeSIRA LIFT Learning Review -Policy influence – B. Douthwaite
• Mr. James Adu, Regional Director of Agriculture – Bono East Region

Workshop 2

• Isolina Boto, COLEAD/DeSIRA LIFT – Collaboration with non research actors

Workshop 3

• DeSIRA LIFT Learning Review – MSP – M. Roefs

• CAAPS
• Roundtable 3
• Roundtable 4
• Roundtable 5

Business Ghana