Due to lack of enough support, innovation in the agricultural sector in Africa is still too scarce to meet the great challenges that agriculture is facing (climate change, demographic growth, etc.). Organisations supporting innovation gather in order to increase their efficiency in providing support to innovators but these networks (that we chose to call Innovation Support Service Ecosystems, ISSEs) need to be better understood and strengthened. In order to best describe the situation of ISSE in Africa, we propose an integrative framework of different research trends and compiled all the initiatives of organisation gatherings that had been named differently along the years. We conducted a review of both scientific and grey literature, and found two criteria to be the most appropriate in describing and differentiating ISSEs: the mode of emergence (ad-hoc, planned and intermediary) and the governance of the ISSE (shared, concentrated and partly-shared). This led to identifying four different types of ISSE in agriculture in Africa. We detailed their main characteristics (origin, functioning, life expectancy, etc.).
