Central to the strategy of the ILAC Initiative is a Learning Laboratory in which professionals from collaborative research programmes come together to share knowledge and experiences, experiment with new approaches for facilitating innovation for poverty reduction, and evaluate the results.

The challenges:

• Understanding how to increase research effectiveness in contributing to innovation and poverty alleviation
• Understanding the complex roles of agricultural researchers and others, including but not limited to farmers in the process of agricultural innovation
• Identifying the most strategic entry points to influence decision makers and research policy (guidelines, standards and incentives)
•  Integrating learning and change (improvement/adjustment) into monitoring, evaluation and impact assessment processes by building credibility, usefulness and relevance into their practice
• Stimulating widespread adoption of successful practice across projects, programmes, organizations and beyond
  

 Participants:

Next Meeting:

• Location: Nairobi, Kenya
• Date:  September 21-25, 2009
• Objectives:

1. Draw lessons from participants’ experiences with collaborative programs / partnerships, to inform the development of partnership strategies and policies in agricultural R&D organizations
2. Conduct a self-assessment of the ILAC Project
3. Plan future activities of the Learning Laboratory and the ILAC Project more broadly

    

'Members only' area

Photo credit: ILAC Learning Laboratory Meeting in Cali, March 2008 by Cristina Sette