SUMMARYRapid climatic and socio-economic changes challenge current agricultural R&D capacity. The necessary quantum leap in knowledge generation should build on the innovation capacity of farmers themselves. A novel citizen science methodology, triadic comparisons of technologies or tricot, was implemented in pilot studies in India, East Africa, and Central America. The methodology involves distributing a pool of agricultural technologies in different combinations of three to individual farmers who observe these technologies under farm conditions and compare their performance. Since the combinations of three technologies overlap, statistical methods can piece together the overall performance ranking of the complete pool of technologies. The tricot approach affords wide scaling, as the distribution of trial packages and instruction sessions is relatively easy to execute, farmers do not need to be organized in collaborative groups, and feedback is easy to collect, even by phone. The tricot approach provides interpretable, meaningful results and was widely accepted by farmers. The methodology underwent improvement in data input formats. A number of methodological issues remain: integrating environmental analysis, capturing gender-specific differences, stimulating farmers' motivation, and supporting implementation with an integrated digital platform. Future studies should apply the tricot approach to a wider range of technologies, quantify its potential contribution to climate adaptation, and embed the approach in appropriate institutions and business models, empowering participants and democratizing science.

Food security in Africa continues to be a big a challenge and one of the key constraints is lack of information on many facets of agricultural research and development to the key sector stakeholders. However, in recent years a wide range of Information Communication and Technology (ICT) platforms and mechanisms have been used across Africa in enhancement of exchange of agricultural related information for increased productivity and improvement of marketing of crops and livestock products. The purpose of the review paper was therefore to assess the nature, diversity and impacts of ICTs used in African agriculture and also highlight the key challenges hindering more widespread use of the technologies. A Kenyan case study has been used to typify the integrated nature of ICTs use in agriculture. The paper reveals that there is a very wide range of ICTs being used and these include web portals, mass media and different types of mobile telephone based services. Of all the ICTs, the radio service is the most effective in reaching a wide cross-section of agricultural research and development fraternity. It is evident that ICTs are making impact in increasing productivity and marketing of products but there are still several constraints including unconducive policy environment, insufficient communication infrastructure and inadequate farmer level capacities to use available ICTs. Public policy should therefore address these challenges and constraints within the sphere of rural development in general and agricultural productivity in particular. The review concludes that when mobile phones are combined with other ICT platforms such as mass media, the impact on agriculture is likely to be very high.

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