The Spate of Agricultural Technology and Innovation Generation in African Countries: A Meta-Analysis

Abstract

Technology generation, transmission and adoption are vital to the development of agriculture and the derivation of social-economic benefits from the sector. African agricultural development is low compared to other continents in the world. This is often attributed to poor adoption of technologies with the speculation that the research sector in African countries is generating good technologies that are not adopted and used. This paper presents a meta-analysis of research reports from studies conducted in 12 African countries, to identify and document various technologies, knowledge and inventions generated from research activities in the last 30 years and the proportion that have already been translated into innovations with accompanying socio-economic benefits. This study showed a total of 1, 228 technologies with 71% related to crops, 8.8%, 3.3%, 5.0% and 5.9% attributed to livestock, fisheries, processing and natural resource management respectively. The last six percent covers other areas viz., value chain, marketing, governance, etc. Priority efforts were directed at cereal crops (46.7%) and root and tuber crops (14.5%), while cattle, dairy and small ruminants were in the range of 1.0%, 1.6% and 1.6% respectively. Horticulture value chains accounted for 3.4%. Comparative analysis with other countries indicated that mean technology generation per year in Africa was of only five technologies/country per year. Evidence from this study suggests that the poor performance of agriculture is still due to the low turnout of useful technologies especially in the high-value commodities with the potential to improve the nutrition and incomes of producers. The evidence further debunked the myth that Africa has a lot of useful technologies on the shelf that are not adopted.