Innovation to Impact Partnerships and Systems(2IPS)

The Innovation to Impact Partnerships and Systems (2IPS) is the most recent label given to the key function of FARA in delivering its core mandate of fostering technology generation, dissemination, and adoption to foster broad-based agricultural productivity across Africa.

The function is as old as FARA itself and initially had the label “Partnerships and Strategic Alliances” at a time when the FARA technical units were categorized as networking support functions.

In 2014 following FARA’s new Strategy and MTOP, the labeling of the units was changed to FARA Strategic Priority (SP), the SP1: Visioning Africa’s Agricultural Transformation and Strategic Analysis. The core attention of SP1 was to,

(a) Track emerging opportunities and risks;

(b) Foresight guidance to agricultural research and innovation;

(d) Broker strategic alliances and empower partnerships.

Later in 2016, the new MTOP 2 was re-casted, and the unit label was changed to “Innovation Systems and Partnerships” (ISP), the core function of ISP includes,

(1) Building and Strengthening innovation systems and partnerships among national and regional stakeholders,

(2). Develop partner’s capacity to facilitate multi-stakeholder engagement, and Interactions AND

(3). Facilitate resource support for the implementation of the science agenda and regional integration.

The current label 2IPS took off in 2019 following the development of the FARA strategy 2019-2-28 and business plan 2019-2023. Despite the several changes in FARA strategy and the label of the unit, the function revolves around the generation of innovations through research for technology generation, scaling, institutions, and partnerships for broad-based agricultural development.

The 2IPS runs the core FARA mandate of weaving partnerships at all levels to address the development of African agriculture. It has hosted myriads of ground-breaking initiatives in Africa and in recent times, it is the host of the Soil Initiative for Africa, the Common African Agro-Parks (CAAPs); the Africa Climate Smart Agriculture Initiative (ACSAi) and lots of others.

Objectives

The core objective of the 2IPS is to enhance partnerships across geographies, sectors, and agricultural value chains for the deployment of science, technologies, and innovation to achieve CAADP results. The focused themes include

Theme 1: Strengthening coherence and synergies among research and innovation actors to improve the overall effectiveness of Research and Innovation systems.

Theme 2: Building and strengthening equitable partnerships for strengthening and translating innovation to large-scale impacts.

Theme 3: Mobilizing Science to Respond to Emerging Risks and Opportunities.

Theme 4: Leveraging innovations to improve agribusiness performance and jobs for the youth, and

Theme 5: Strategic Cross-cutting Initiative: Climate Change and Bioeconomy.