African Forum for Agricultural Advisory Services (AFAAS) is a continental platform for mutual learning and innovation among agricultural extension and advisory services providers across Africa. The AFAAS’ goal is to enhance utilization of improved knowledge and innovations for improving productivity oriented towards individual and national development objectives. AFAAS operates through multi-stakeholder country fora that embrace public and private actors in the national agricultural innovation systems.

AFAAS is aligned with Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) and therefore contributes to African Union’s goal of delivering average growth rate of 6% GDP. Within the current AU thrust for enhancing CAADP momentum based on the Malabo declaration of June 2014, the specific focus of AFAAS is on knowledge and knowledge support for enhancing the utilization and adoption of productivity-enhancing technologies, value-adding processes and loss-reducing practices in the value chains within which smallholder producers are embedded.

The African Forum for Agricultural Advisory Services (AFAAS) was initially formed as the Sub-Saharan African Network on Agricultural Advisory Services (SSANAAS). The SSANAAS was created at the 1st Regional Networking Symposium on Innovations in AAS, held in Kampala, Uganda 11-14 October 2004. The initial member countries were Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda. A second Symposium was held from 24-27 September 2006 in Kampala. It brought together the additional African countries of Eritrea, Ethiopia, Ghana, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, and Zambia; this brought the total of participating member African countries to fourteen. At this Symposium it was decided that the network should go beyond Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and embrace the whole of Africa. This necessitated the change of the name to the African Forum for Agricultural Advisory Services (AFAAS).

The African Forum for Agricultural Advisory Services (AFAAS), was accordingly set up as the successor (and substitute for and permanent replacement) of SSANAAS, and AFAAS was legally established in Uganda as a NGO under the name African Forum for Agricultural Advisory Services (AFAAS).