2023 DeSIRA Global Annual Report

2023 DeSIRA Global Annual Report

The Development Smart Innovation through Research in Agriculture (DeSIRA) Initiative, supported by the European Commission (DG INTPA), supports research and innovation (R&I) projects in low and middle-income countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America through 68 projects (2019-2025). DeSIRA encourages a climate-relevant, productive and sustainable transformation of agriculture and food systems by adopting climate-smart and agroecological innovations through multi-stakeholder collaboration, and capacity development at individual and organisational levels to promote innovation. COLEAD is the lead of the second service area (with support from the Natural Resources Institute) of one of these projects: DeSIRA-LIFT. By “Leveraging the DeSIRA initiative for agri-food systems transformation”, this project aims to catalyse DeSIRA programme current and future activities (June 2021–May 2025).

Each year, the DeSIRA Initiative assesses its performance based on the DeSIRA Global Monitoring and Evaluation Framework to steer the DeSIRA Initiative, assess overall achievements and communicate on new approaches to agricultural R&I.

The Annual Global Report 2023 was recently published and provides updates about the progress of 46 DeSIRA projects that have been implemented for at least two years as of December 2022. While the impact assessment of the DeSIRA Initiative requires a long-term perspective that goes beyond the projects’ timeframes, several organisations strengthened by DeSIRA projects are expected to achieve a positive impact on food system and innovation system transformation.

Links to the (summary) reports are below: · Brief summary · Annual Global Report 2023 (full report)

Key figures about the outputs of the DeSIRA projects include:

• 234 multi-stakeholder innovation mechanisms strengthened or developed at international national, and local/subnational levels (output 1)
• 955 climate-smart or agroecological innovations under development for use at farm level (output 2)
• 250,000 smallholder farmers reached by R&I initiatives (output 3)
• 34 curricula or training programmes have been upgraded or developed to respond to the needs for agricultural innovation at national level (output 3)
• 598 knowledge products developed, including 54 scientific publications (output 5)
• 61 policy dialogues on agriculture and food policy development organised, and 63 policy documents produced (output 6)

Key figures about the outcomes of the DeSIRA projects include:

• 187 innovations adopted by smallholder farmers (outcome 1)
• 150 national research entities, 157 farmers’ organisations and 75 local NGOs and community-based organisations in the process of strengthening their innovation capacity (outcome 2)
• 182 agriculture and food-related micro, small or medium enterprises (MSMEs) strengthened or created (outcome 3)
• 43 countries or international organisations have increased their ability to sustainably transform agriculture and food systems and/or adapt to climate change (outcome 4).

Photo credit : DESIRA LIFT Community