For ILRI to achieve its overarching goal of reducing poverty via the three major pathways it has identified, it must shift its research portfolio. A set of ‘guiding principles’ arise from carefully considering external influences on its research agenda:

• Give high priority to research on securing the assets of the poor and particularly on enhancing participation of the poor in markets at all levels for livestock and livestock products.
• Take advantage of ILRI’s capacity to use new and applied science to address the problems of developing country agriculture, and increase efforts to improve the adoption and use of innovative research products.
• Maintain research focus on reducing poverty in sub-Saharan Africa and increase research partnerships aimed towards impact in South Asia.
• Maintain research focus targeting mixed crop–livestock systems, in which the vast majority of poor livestock keepers are found, and increase research aimed at landless and peri-urban systems.
• Increase research emphasis on animal species kept by poor livestock keepers, increasing the emphasis on sheep, goats, pigs and poultry.
• Incorporate gender analysis in research activities, identifying the needs of poor women and addressing their marginalised status in view of the vital role they play in agriculture in the developing world and their effectiveness in channelling benefits to families.
• Strengthen the capacity of ILRI and its partners to contribute to the identified research themes. This will extend beyond running courses and training students to innovative training activities and research partnerships.
• Increase awareness of both the role and the potential of livestock to reduce poverty and of  ILRI’s goal, activities and contributions through more effective communication, disseminating research results to wider, more diverse audiences. 
• Adopt a facilitative, catalytic and brokering role that empowers, equips and encourages a wide range of diverse partners to work together with ILRI to reduce poverty through livestock-related research and development. 
• Strengthen participatory approaches to research activities, listening to, learning from and responding to the needs of clients and others involved.

Strategic research themes

These guiding principles help identify a number of priority problems with demonstrable links to poverty. From them, a set of five ‘strategic research’ themes emerge.

A strategic research theme is a focused cluster of multidisciplinary research projects and activities that together contribute towards achieving a common problem-oriented objective. All the themes will enable ILRI, in partnership with others, to achieve its overall goal via the three pathways out of poverty.

In selecting its set of strategic research themes as its key areas of focus to the year 2010, ILRI considered the major influences in the external environment, the current research portfolio, its goal of reducing poverty through sustainable development, the needs and priorities of national agricultural research systems, the poverty reduction pathways, and its own guiding principles. It thus identified the following complementary and interrelated strategic research themes.

What is ‘strategic research’ for ILRI? For ILRI, as an international agricultural research centre, strategic research is characterised by the following features: It responds to problems that have local relevance with national, regional and global application. It is primarily geared towards finding principles, processes, methods and technologies that can be applied to other locations and regions. The ultimate product of strategic research is not site specific but an evaluation of the processes, principles and technological elements required for successful adaptation and use in a variety of situations. It integrates different levels and phases of research. It is rarely limited to one level or phase but requires systemic approaches. It needs to be conducted at all stages in the research and development continuum and at local, national, regional and global levels. It is collaborative in nature. One participant working alone cannot provide the complex set of research methods, processes and sources of innovation the research requires.

Theme 1—Supporting policy-making and priority-setting for livestock research and development: Current and future roles of livestock in poverty reduction

By what means can the livestock sector affect poverty? What broad changes in the role of livestock, such as globalisation of markets, climate change and urbanisation, affect poverty? Donors and governments realise the value of addressing these issues from both a developing country and a research perspective.

Research will aim to gain further understanding of how livestock can help reduce poverty. Predictive studies will use systems analysis and geographical information systems. Appreciation of what drives change, such as increase in human population, economic growth, urbanisation, HIV/AIDS and climate change, will help assess the evolving role and the dynamics of livestock in reducing poverty. Such understanding can help shape appropriate farming systems for the future. Systems modelling will be an important component within this theme. Better monitoring and evaluation methods will be applied to measure effect.

EXAMPLES OF OUTPUTS

• mapping of poverty and livestock, moving beyond identifying clusters of poor livestock keepers to mapping better opportunities for different types of livestock research

• modelling of households of poor livestock keepers, for better understanding of how livestock contributes to the diverse facets of reducing poverty, and to improve the effect of livestock-related interventions on poverty

• impact assessment of key steps such as the development of vaccines, improved food and feed crops, and better management of trypanosomosis

Theme 2—Enabling access to innovation: Adapting and delivering technology and information

Settings where both the biophysical and the social context of the farming systems are highly variable require a decentralised participatory approach in which farmers learn jointly with researchers how to use specific technologies to improve farmer welfare. The direction of future research and development is clear: to experiment with diverse approaches and build a set of contrasting case studies from which to extract broad lessons for developing participatory processes in the livestock production settings of the poor. These process lessons, if successful, will then be disseminated.

An integrated approach towards natural resource management will emphasise ‘research for development’ within innovation systems. This theme represents a largely new departure for ILRI. It will require strengthening its social science capacity, developing a wider range of partnerships, emphasising participatory approaches and making greater use of interdisciplinary teams.

The focus on livestock will have three facets: 1) understanding innovation processes, 2) developing and testing participatory processes to improve adoption, and 3) facilitating institutional arrangements for instigating innovation.

Factors hampering women from using newly acquired knowledge, technologies and other innovations will receive special attention. The benefits that can accrue from modern scientific methods will be linked to traditional knowledge bases, and effective ways of building the farmer’s capacity to innovate and integrate both knowledge systems will be developed.

Facilitating institutional arrangements for livestock innovation involves creating ‘platforms’ where the main participants in livestock research and development will regularly come together to develop a shared vision and to clarify their functions, roles, contributions and the interactions among themselves. These platforms will also involve identifying more effective ways to influence policy-makers to ensure that research findings are incorporated into new, improved policies intended to lessen poverty.

EXAMPLES OF OUTPUTS

• widespread dissemination of the ‘infection and treatment’ method for control of East Coast fever in eastern Africa, involving government agencies, private sector veterinary drug companies, extension services, private animal health services, research institutes
• participatory development of best-bet forage, food and feed crops as a means for their rapid adoption by the poor

• adaptation of the farmer field-school concept to improve livestock systems of the poor, starting with smallholder dairy enterprises

Theme 3— Improving market access: Opportunities and threats from globalisation and the Livestock Revolution

Growing livestock markets in the developing world offer a real opportunity for poor livestock keepers to work their way out of poverty. The feasibility for smallholders to get access to these markets will depend on public investments that address such constraints as food safety issues, sanitary trade barriers in international trade and distortions caused by lack of consideration of environmental externalities frequently associated with large-scale industrial livestock production.

Research will identify opportunities for the poor, especially for women and other marginalized peoples, to exploit more effectively market opportunities at all levels. Research will concentrate on policy issues related to improving the marketing of livestock and livestock products. A major focus of this theme will be the rapidly increasing demand for dairy and meat products and the important role that smallholder farmers play in supplying rural and urban markets. ILRI will transfer the principles of smallholder dairy production it has successfully developed in East Africa to other species and to other regions of the developing world. It will also exploit new and emerging markets for non-traditional products such as carbon credits and stewardship or sustainable utilisation of biodiversity.

EXAMPLES OF OUTPUTS

• analysis of implications of WTO negotiations on international and domestic markets for livestock products and on the participation of the poor in these markets
• identification of sanitary trade barriers affecting the participation of the poor in livestock markets
• development of innovations (technical, institutional and policy) to improve the competitiveness of poor livestock producers

• comparative analysis of smallholder dairy systems leading to the identification of policy, technology and institutional interventions that maximise the opportunities for reducing poverty along the dairy value-chain.

  

Theme 4—Securing assets: Better livelihoods through the application of biotechnology

ILRI is committed to applying science to develop technologies that will allow poor livestock keepers to secure their assets-for example, developing vaccines and mapping genetic traits. Applying these technologies reduces the high risk that these livestock keepers run of losing their assets or not realizing their full value. The institute sees a vitally important role for itself in using biotechnology-a cutting-edge science—to identify solutions that will have impact on reducing poverty.

Developing countries face a substantial challenge as they attempt to participate in the dynamic growth in biotechnology. They have difficulty in influencing the agenda in a field strongly driven by the private sector and developed countries. Demands are for training and collaborative research to address problems specific to developing countries. Given their nature, these problems will be addressed only by international or regional public research. Some research issues that ILRI and partners will tackle using biotechnology will likely not even appear on the agendas of most research institutes in the North. ILRI therefore has a responsibility to ensure that these issues are considered for public investment.

EXAMPLES OF OUTPUTS

• capacity building for partners in national agricultural research systems in the field of livestock-related biosafety

• development of improved food and feed crops, initially cowpeas, millets and sorghum, for mixed livestock–crop systems
• pen-side diagnostics that can help farmers control tick-borne diseases.

Theme 5—Sustaining lands and livelihoods: Improved human and environmental health

Governments, development agencies and NGOs are increasingly realising that to address the needs of the rural poor, more holistic approaches are needed that encompass agriculture, nutrition and health. Livestock frequently provide an important entry point to enhanced stewardship of these systems. The broad need is to integrate environmental and human health concerns into livestock development initiatives.

Livestock can serve as an important entry point for addressing environmental as well as human health issues. This theme will follow an integrated approach to natural resource management—fundamentally about the need to balance individuals’ and society’s competing interests in multiple uses for any natural resource. It is strongly concerned with the way people use natural resources to support livelihoods, and institutional and ecological requirements for long-term sustainability.

This research theme will also consider both positive and negative effects of livestock and their products on the health of livestock keepers, the wider community in which livestock keepers live and consumers of animal food products. Considerations will include ecological determinants of health and human nutrition, food safety issues and the risks posed by zoonoses.

EXAMPLES OF OUTPUTS

• identification of entry points for reducing poverty in crop–livestock systems
• assessment of the importance of bovine tuberculosis among poor livestock owners and identification of methods to address it

• valuation of environmental services (biodiversity conservation, water catchment, CO₂ fixation) as a basis for reducing rural poverty in pastoralist regions

• innovative holistic approaches to primary health care that address human and animal health jointly in smallholder mixed systems.

Linking the strategic research themes

Some of these five research themes introduce novel directions for the institute; others involve a change in focus of current work. For example:

• The effective adoption of the products of livestock research is largely a new area that ILRI has not explicitly addressed in the past.

• Improving livelihood opportunities for the poor through greater access to market opportunities builds on the existing, successful work ILRI and its partners have done on research on smallholder dairy policy. New work will expand its geographical, species and product focus.

• Improving livelihoods of the poor by using biotechnology to develop products and tools that help to secure assets builds on ILRI’s existing collaborative advantage in the biosciences, but it changes the emphasis from enhancing productivity to promoting the security of assets of the poor.

The five themes are areas on which ILRI will focus to ensure it has impact on poverty reduction. They represent focus, not scale, of operation.