Learning groups can have big impact

The Knowledge Programme on “Smallholder Agency in the Globalised Market” is at present building a Learning Network as its core instrument. This network will be a group of some 15 persons from Africa, Latin America and Asia that will focus on the commissioning of innovative studies, the exchange of ideas and the diffusion of the results into the global debate and the capacities of civil society.

Accelerating sustainable trade

What will the world look like in 2050? The long-term trends of population growth, climate change and increasing consumption per capita are not likely to change any time soon, resulting in accelerating pressures on natural resources such as soils and forest. Current increases in agricultural production are mainly based on the expansion of agricultural area – a process that causes great damage already and moreover will have exhausted its possibilities in the very near future. Sustainable intens...

Inclusive Improvement: Standards and Smallholders

Millions of smallholder families in tropical commodity chains can double their income through improved management (specifically to enhance waste recycling), through better control over green house gas emission (through regular methane production and composting), through decreasing external inputs and through a focus on improving product quality. This book argues that combining sustainable development and poverty reduction is feasible. But it requires efforts of such magnitude that all parties...

Pressure-cooking for progress

Knowledge is needed to effectively serve poor and marginalised groups by making grounded choices for strategies and projects, and to timely adapt to change. How can development organisations acquire this knowledge? Hire more consultants? Go to the university? Development organisations need to build their own knowledge base and their own strategies to make this base grow. Development organisations need more tools and interactions to drive their own, practice-based forms of learning. A key elem...

MoU Small Producers Agency in the Globalized Market Programme signed

On 21 January a Memorandum of Understanding was signed between Hivos and the International Institute for Development Cooperation for the Knowledge Programme Small Producers Agency in the Globalized Market. Explicit statements of demand from organisations across various sectors suggest that there is a distinct and urgent need to integrate and synthesise existing bodies of knowledge – both scientific and practitioner knowledge – produced and disseminated in a way that strengthens the capacity e...