April 24, 2025

Key Insights: Integrating Advisors into the AKIS

During the EUFRAS Annual General Assembly, TEAGASC hosted a dynamic workshop focused on the theme “Integrating Advisors into the AKIS – What barriers have you encountered that limit your ability to engage with the AKIS in your country?”

The session followed a “World Café” format, creating space for open discussion and collaboration. Participants explored barriers across six key topics:

• Skills – Technical & Soft  
• Internal organisation of advisory services 
• Engagement with clients 
• Networking, Knowledge Exchange, (Access to new Knowledge)  
• Perception of advisors by other actors in the AKIS  
• Policy, Funding and Administration  

In a second round of the activity, participants were invited to identify and prioritize the three most important barriers under each topic. This was done by placing stickers next to the points they considered most significant.

The workshop concluded with each topic facilitator sharing the top barriers identified by their group—offering valuable insights into the main challenges advisors face in connecting with Agricultural Knowledge and Innovation Systems (AKIS) across different countries.

Key Results: Five key themes were identified based on the feedback received from advisors.

Advisory Survey

The International Academy for Rural Advisory Services (IALB), the European Forum for Agricultural and Rural Advisory Services (EUFRAS), the South Eastern Europe Advisory Service Network (SEASN) and the Horizon Europe project modernAKIS are currently conducting a survey that seeks to better understand the needs and challenges of agricultural advisors and advisory organisations. The aim is to derive support offers for better networking and further development of advisory services in rural areas. In addition, demands and proposals are to be developed for better anchoring and support of advisory services and vocational training in the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy after 2027. In this article a small sample of responses are presented for those questions in the survey that specifically relate to the topic of “Integration into the AKIS”. It is important to remember that this survey is still open and final analysis of the results is still to be done, what is presented here is a snapshot meant to complement some of the findings from the modernAKIS workshop.

Overall, more than half the respondents (56.4%) rated their involvement in the AKIS as relevant to very relevant. Roughly a quarter of respondents believed that involvement in the AKIS was not relevant to them at all. Those that gave a response of “Not Relevant” were asked a follow up question on why they are not included or involved in their country’s AKIS. Of this proportion of respondents the majority (83.1%) said it was because they did not know AKIS (Figure above), 8.5% indicated it was because they do not have access to AKIS and approximately 5% said it was the role of their colleagues.

Examining the figure below, the activities that were rated the most important towards supporting advisors’ involvement in the AKIS were i) networking between research, advice and practice, ii) support from their own organisations and iii) access to current research results. Of all activities, continuous training opportunities on systems thinking and AKIS had the most responses rated at less important or not important. The proportion of respondents that gave no response also increased down the list of activities which may indicate stakeholder fatigue or a lack of knowledge about those specific activities.