Analysis of agricultural innovation dynamics in rural areas: A case study of rice parboiling in the municipality of Glazoué in Benin, between 2013 and 2021

Abstract

Dynamics and magnitudes of innovation in the agri-food sector are rarely discussed in developing countries, including in the Republic of Benin. This article fills this gap by looking at these phenomena in the rice parboiling activity, between 2013 and 2021. It took as references, parboiling-related innovations inventoried under the project Joint Learning in Innovation Systems in African Agriculture (JOLISAA) between 2010 and 2013. Also, semi-structured and structured interviews were conducted with 103 women rice parboilers and six resource persons involved in rice parboiling in Glazoué, one of the rice production municipalities and poles in Benin. Quantitative analyses consisted of estimating frequencies, percentages, means, and standard deviations. Qualitative data were summarised in tables, figures, and quotations of significant utterances. Findings show that between 2013 and 2021, 8 innovations inventoried under the JOLISAA project in 2013, underwent up to 23 further technological and technical (65%), and organisational and institutional (35%) innovations. Each of these innovations took place over an average period of 2 years. 74% of these 23 innovations were developed by technical partners, compared to the 26% generated by the studied women rice-parboilers. Innovations from these women were predominantly incremental, while those from their technical partners were mainly modular in magnitude. Since modular, architectural, and radical innovations are generally the most profitable, strengthening the presence of technical partners or innovation brokering specialists could increase the dynamics of such innovations for the benefit of the target women. Findings also highlight the importance of continuous documentation which allowed to track as exhaustively as possible the innovations that occurred between 2013 and 2021 in rice-parboiling in the study area.