This project is concerned with the improvement of tertiary agricultural learning resources by incorporating local knowledge as well as results from agricultural research. Despite the abundance of relevant research results from the NARIS’ and CGIAR institutions, much of what is available in the form of textbooks, practical learning manuals and reference materials in agriculture is still based on experiences from outside Africa. There is a gap between the mechanisms for generating knowledge and those that share and apply knowledge to solve development problems.

This project is addressing two critical areas:

• Evaluating the bottlenecks in human and institutional capacity to contextualize learning resources
• Initiating on a pilot scale, a nucleus of African Agricultural Writers to generate good examples and motivate others to write more on agriculture and natural resources.

ANAFE, through a grant from Sida has been able to stimulate interest in the development of learning materials in Agroforestry. Among others, ANAFE facilitated educators and researchers to transform and improve research results into learning objects useful at all levels form basic education to university programmes. ANAFE is therefore building on this experience by framing the problem domain more succinctly and concretizing the culture of authoring learning resources by Africans, with a focus on agriculture and natural resources. A systematic study will provide a thorough analysis and synthesis of the problem. The recommendations drawn from this study will be targeted at different levels from regional down to specific national institutions. Advantages will be taken of the large number of institutions already working with and linked to ANAFE.

The project results will make it easier to link knowledge with practice and particularly to address the issue of incorporating local/contextualized knowledge in poverty reduction strategies and programmes.