Tropical Agriculture Platform
FAO hosts the Secretariat of the Tropical Agriculture Platform (TAP), a G20-supported facilitation mechanism comprising 45 global, regional and national partners, representing agricultural research, education and extension, and international technical, development and funding agencies.
TAP focuses on the development of national capacities for agricultural innovation in the tropics, where most of the developing countries are located and the capacity gap is especially wide.
By helping to bridge the capacity gap, TAP aims to pave the way for agricultural innovations that meet the demands of its principal users – small farmers, small and medium-sized agribusinesses and consumers.
The project ‘Developing capacities in agricultural innovation systems: scaling up the Tropical Agriculture Platform Framework’ (in short, TAP-AIS) is part of a larger EU Initiative called ‘Development Smart Innovation through Research in Agriculture (DeSIRA): Towards climate-relevant Agricultural and Knowledge Innovation Systems’. The objective of the DeSIRA initiative is to boost innovation in agriculture and food systems transformation of partner countries with a view to be more resilient to the effects of climate change.
The TAP-AIS project is funded by the EU (as part of the DeSIRA Initiative Pillar 2) and implemented by FAO, with a budget of EUR 5 millions over 5 years (2019-2024). It focuses on nine countries: Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Colombia, Eritrea, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Malawi, Pakistan, Rwanda and Senegal.
The project supports TAP to strengthen capacities to innovate in national agricultural innovation systems (AIS) in the context of climate-relevant, productive, and sustainable transformation of agriculture and food systems in Africa, Latin America, Asia and Pacific.
The TAP-AIS project evolves from the experience of the EU-funded Capacity Development for Agricultural Innovation Systems (CDAIS) project, which successfully tested and validated the TAP Common Framework on capacity development for agricultural innovation systems in eight countries from 2015 to 2019. The Common Framework provides a comprehensive package to guide demand-driven capacity development interventions and it is a key tool for the TAP-AIS.