| Sumario: | In 1990, the Government of El Salvador closed the National Center for Agricultural Technology (Spanish acronym: CENTA) and dismissed its 2700 staff. A few months later, it reopened the institute with a staff of 700, and gave it a clear task: to become an efficient and effective organization. The new CENTA leadership worked to create a new organization, in which the farmer would play a key role. The research partnership it built with farmers is based on five critical practices: (1) improving CENTA's access to farmers, (2) collecting in-depth information about farmers, (3) involving farmers in research planning, (4) involving farmers in research implementation, and (5) sharing research information with farmers. In a short time, CENTA improved the well-being of an impressive number of farmers and documented these improvements. For these reasons, ISNAR recorded CENTA's procedures for working with farmers as a "benchmark" for agricultural research organizations. A benchmark is an example of a particularly successful management practice from one organization that is documented and used as a model for other organizations. This Briefing Paper is the second of a series of benchmarks that ISNAR is documenting from national agricultural research organizations in developing countries. The intent is that these benchmarks will inspire other research organizations to copy or adapt aspects of the successful management practices described.
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