Contribution to the Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR)

The Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR) is the main stakeholder-led forum for the discussion and coordination around strategic policy issues in international agricultural research for development. GFAR mobilizes partners from science and society to reform and strengthen research and extension systems around the world and to increase their impact in development. GFAR aims to accomplish this by providing a platform and opportunities for these stakeholders to forge effective partnerships and strategic alliances with particular emphasis on National Agricultural Research Systems (NARS) in order to benefit from the economies of scale and synergies of action that come from the pooling of knowledge expertise human and financial resources to tackle various agriculture-related developmental challenges. GFAR’s focus puts the poor and particularly the rural poor at the centre of research and innovation processes with research embedded in development processes rather than starting from a technological perspective. GFAR provides a key vehicle for diverse partners to come together share their experiences and find common cause and equitable partnership in addressing key themes. It provides an inclusive and objective mechanism for issues affecting the poor to be explored and for innovative partnerships to be formed.

The expected intermediate outcomes for this project include: (1) develop a more comprehensive multi-partner evidence base for cross-sectoral linkages in agricultural research for development; (2) increased coordination among practitioners to contribute towards the objectives of the Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development 2012 and CGIAR research; and (3) achieve impacts at scale through user feedback systems.