ILRI news

Ce jeudi 15 avril, en dépit d’une pluie torrentielle, du retard subséquent et de quelques fuites dans la tente prévue pour rassembler participants et orateurs, la réunion annuelle de l’Institut International de Recherche sur l’Elevage (ILRI) a démarré à Addis Abeba dans la bonne humeur.

En effet, Dirk Hoekstra, responsable du projet IPMS et facilitateur de la réunion a annoncé son anniversaire, et sa joie à le célébrer en présence de ses collègues…

Alan Duncan, chercheur et responsable de l’organisation de l’événement, a ensuite souhaité la bienvenue aux participants puis a rappelé “nous sommes tous ensemble aujourd’hui pour mieux sentir et pourquoi pas apprendre la culture ILRI. Ceci devrait permettre à chacun de comprendre la position de l’Institut concernant les aspects positifs mais aussi négatifs liés à l’élevage.”

Pour rappel, le thème de la réunion annuelle 2010 est “Elevage: le bon, la brute et le…”, et un prix sera attribué à celui ou celle qui complètera le mieux l’expression laissée incomplète.

Après avoir introduit le programme des trois jours à venir, Alan Duncan a laissé la place au Directeur Général de l’ILRI, Carlos Seré. “La réunion annuelle devrait permettre à tous d’établir des connexions” a t-il indiqué “mais aussi à envisager comment l’ILRI va s’intégrer dans la nouvelle structure du Groupe Consultatif.”

Après une présentation des lignes stratégiques de l’ILRI et des prochains défis à relever, Carlos Seré a laissé le duo de facilitateurs, Nadia Manning-Thomas et Julius Nyangaga, entrainer la foule vers un petit buna bien serré, sous la pluie toujours, mais prête à échanger et discuter sous les parapluies…

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On Thursday 15 April, ILRI staff, Board members and partners gather in Addis Ababa for the first day of the annual program meeting. The first major plenary session mobilizes a range of speakers on different dimensions of the ‘goods and bads’ issue. The presentations are online:

• Livestock: The good, the bad and … (Mario Herrero, ILRI)
• Livestock goods – Pathways out of poverty: Experiences from South Asia (Narayan Hegde, India)
• Livestock and human health: The good, the bad, the gaps (Delia Grace, ILRI)
• Livestock in the developed world: Good? Bad? Or a mixed bag? (Tara Garnett, UK)

See a short video interview with IFPRI’s David Spielman in livestock research priorities.

We also asked leaders of ILRI research groups to briefly present what each is doing in terms of livestock goods and bads, and which research gaps need to be filled.

This post is part of a series associated with the ILRI Annual Program Meeting in Addis Ababa, April 2010. More postings …

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The Improving Productivity and Market Success of Ethiopian farmers (IPMS) Program held its Annual Review and Planning meeting from 12th to 14th April 2010 on the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) Campus in Addis Ababa. For the occasion, Research and Development Officers (RDOs) from the 10 districts distributed among the four larger states of Ethiopia where IPMS implements its program, also called Pilot Learning Woredas (PLW), came to Addis Ababa to discuss the program of work for 2010-2011 with IPMS headquarters team members. The theme of this meeting was a focus on ‘scaling up beyond the districts we are operating in’ and consisted, among others, of training sessions, M&E reports, presentations on gender and market issues, future workplans and publications-all targeted at how IPMS can take this forward and wider. According to Ermias Sehai, the project’s knowledge management adviser, “it is the last year of the project and it is very important that we document and communicate the lessons learned during the last five years of project implementation. We continue to capture, document and share our activities and results. Key to this is getting feedback and inputs from the RDOs on activities and results from their respective PLWs.” Zooming in… One of the training sessions focused on video recording and editing so RDOs can document the work done and results achieved in their PLW. Each participant was provided with a small digital camera recorder and over the course of the Annual Planning Meeting at ILRI, they will have to practice and each day during the APM, they are expected to bring a 3 minute footage of APM or non-APM related activities on campus. Selected footage will be posted on ILRI website. Bringing information ‘home’… Another training consisted of introducing the new ILRI website and the new knowledge base, Mahider, (‘portfolio’ in Amharic). “Often RDOs cannot see the ILRI website because of internet connection problems but in Mahider they can do subscriptions (ILRI feed subscriptions) which makes access to ILRI information easier”. explained Ermias Sehai. Getting together does not happen very often as the PLWs are far away from each other and scattered all over Ethiopia so being actually face to face and sharing experiences is a precious time for all. Extending our experiences… “Over the three days meeting, we also talked about GIS use in regard to the suitability of technologies” explains Noah Kebede, GIS research officer. “Borana cattle, for instance, is a high performing cattle breed in the South of the country. So we first did an analysis of the conditions, climate, grazing lands etc., and then using GIS we checked if there were similar conditions in other parts of the country into which we could introduce this species. Initial results show that areas such as Metema, located North West of Ethiopia, could be a viable prospect due to its similarities to the southern areas.” Next, RDOS will try the same process, introducing a Tigrayan breed called ‘begaiet ‘to the Alamata PLW. Understanding conditions for interventions… “The idea”, adds Abraham Getachew, M&E officer, “is that we always look at the market accessibility then combine this accessibility with the conditions of suitability for the various commodities, whether fruits, vegetables, cattle or forages. Then you can really work on interventions.” For Kahsay Bere, IPMS research officer, “it is not only important to consider biophysical aspects such as rainfall, grazing lands, etc. but socio-economic aspects as well. If we put cattle in a place with no people, it won’t work! Social mapping is an important component in regards to the commodities we deal with.” Getting closer to impact… A key aspect of the meeting and understanding the possibility for scaling up was the discussion lead by Lemlem Aregu, IPMS gender specialist, on the strategies for integrating gender and women in market oriented agricultural value chains. She pointed out that while everyone agrees on the importance of the role and status of women, it is still a strong issue for the group to learn and discuss about, in order to find concrete and viable ways of increasing women’s access to resources. Finally, tired but happy about the outputs of the meeting, Negatu Alemayehu, Ada’a RDO, commented that “it has been good to share experiences among RDOs. We learned about our strengths and weaknesses and hopefully we can use these lessons for the future.” In a positive conclusion, Dirk Hoekstra, IPMS project manager, reminded the IPMS team that “we are an action research program, and we hope that this meeting will contribute to the impact we are looking for.”

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Membre du Conseil d’Administration de l’ILRI depuis 2005, Modibo Traoré a d’abord débuté comme jeune vétérinaire au Mali. Il travaillait sur les maladies du bétail, notamment la trypanosomose, et est venu régulièrement en formation à l’ILCA (maintenant ILRI) à Addis Abeba, centre qui travaillait sur les mêmes problématiques. Il peut encore vous décrire le campus dans les années 80 et s’amuse d’être parmi les anciens maintenant. M. Traoré est ensuite revenu en Ethiopie en tant que porte-parole de son pays, quand il était Ministre du Développement rural de l’Agriculture. Ensuite il a dirigé le Bureau inter-africain des resources animales de l’Union africaine pendant trois ans puis a été nommé sous-directeur général chargé du Département de l’agriculture et de la protection des consommateurs de l’Organisation des Nations Unies pour l’alimentation et l’agriculture (FAO) en 2008. “A la FAO, mon rôle est de coordonner le travail de cinq divisions qui tâchent de répondre aux questions provenant du terrain, afin de créer les synergies nécessaires”, précise t-il. Actif au Conseil d’Administration de l’ILRI, il estime que “l’important est de nous assurer de la continuité des programmes de recherches, et de respecter les orientations initiales. Le rôle de l’ILRI est aussi d’aider à organiser la réflexion par rapport à ces orientations.” Pour Modibo Traoré en effet “au Mali notamment on voit partout des nouvelles façons de faire et nous sommes peut être une espèce en voie de disparition mais il est important d’activer une mémoire collective, de ne pas foncer tête baissée dans la nouveauté.”

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Later this month, many staff, partners and members of the board of trustees of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) will gather in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, for the institute's annual program meeting. Alan Duncan, chair of the organizing committee, introduces below the theme for this meeting. 'Livestock: the good, the bad and the ugly': that’s the focus of the ILRI Annual Program Meeting this year. ILRI has long promoted the virtues of livestock production for the poor. Our calendars and posters proclaim the value of 'livestock for culture', 'livestock for women', 'livestock for food', and so on. Yet in the wider world it seems that our voice is drowned out by a very different view of livestock: a view that sees farm animals as polluting the planet and degrading landscapes. This meeting is an opportunity for the ILRI community to consider these other perspectives and perhaps to try on some new approaches to livestock research for development. People in the developed North have heard a lot recently about the negative impacts of livestock production. Many of these are concerns for animal welfare in so-called 'intensive systems', such as factory-farmed poultry, pigs and cattle. Other concerns are about the obesity, heart disease and other ailments and illnesses caused by over-consumption of fatty red meat, eggs and milk products. Still other concerns are for the global health scares provoked by livestock diseases that become human diseases (mad cow disease, bird flu) or for the economic devastation wrought by livestock diseases such as foot-and-mouth disease. Working in the developing South, we have taken it for granted that such negative views of livestock do not extend to poor livestock keepers in smallholder systems in Africa and Asia. Yet it seems that the world doesn't appreciate such subtleties. We are surrounded by some very negative blanket opinions about livestock. As a livestock research institute, have we neglected to conduct research on the 'bads' of livestock production? At this meeting, we will face some of these issues head on and review the facts around livestock goods and bads. We'll start with some scene setting: what are the goods and bads? What are the key facts and figures? What do the experts think? We'll go on to look at what ILRI is doing in the area of livestock goods and bads and where it should be heading. While many of the goods and bads seem clear, there are many issues that don’t fit our neat categories – we aim at this meeting to tease out some of these 'ugly' issues. We won't redesign our research program at this meeting, but we will start conversations that will shape our thinking about where we are and where we need to go. — Read more about livestock goods and bads … Editor's note: We will publish news and updates on these discussions on our blogs, on Twitter (http://twitter.com/ILRI) and on our website (http://www.ilri.org). Share your views and opinions on these issues with us!

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Small-scale farmers depend largely on their animals and need to feed them well. However, several factors threaten its supply. Technology based innovations have been the mainstream solution to improve the fodder problem. But making farmers find relevant information and networks appears to be as effective for innovation. An ILRI project looks at the issue from a different point of view and discovered that the problems related to fodder availability have just as much to do with access to knowledge as with access to appropriate technology. This article in the March 2010 issue of ILEIA’s ‘Farming Matters’ magazine profiles the DFID-funded Fodder Innovation Project. Read the article… Farming Matters Magazine In this video interview, Ranjitha Puskur shares some lessons from the project: Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Blip.tv video.

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In October 2009, Danielle Nierenberg of the Worldwatch Institute's 'Nourishing the Planet' project began a visit to Africa to document agricultural innovations. Her aim: "to tell stories of hope and success in food production from all over Africa." Early in the trip she visited the ILRI campus in Addis Ababa; she has subsequently been in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Mozambique, Zambia and South Africa … reporting on the project blog. This month, Danielle's blog includes a profile of ILRI's Alan Duncan, member of the project's advisory group. Responding to a question on the association between livestock production and climate change and other negative environmental impacts, Alan argues that "the blanket condemnation of livestock as 'polluters of the planet' misses the nuances of differences between livestock’s role in the rich North and the poor South. Limiting intensive livestock production which oversupplies protein to those in developed countries is probably good for the planet. But in places like Ethiopia, livestock are a crucial element of poor people’s livelihoods and their nutrition. They utilize byproducts of cereal production (straw) and turn them into high-quality protein (meat and milk) for hungry people. They also serve as a source of security in marginal environments, acting as a buffer against disaster in drought-prone environments. Reducing livestock numbers in Africa would have a relatively minor effect on global GHG emissions but would have many negative consequences for the world’s poorest." Read more … (Nourishing the Planet Blog) Follow Danielle on the the Nourishing the Planet project blog Alan Duncan's Blog

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Reflecting on some ILRI experiences in Ethiopia, Alan Duncan explores some challenges associated with innovation systems approaches that focus less on promoting a specific technical solution and more on facilitation of innovation, learning and joint actions among groups of people and organizations. He poses two important generic questions:

• facilitating stakeholder platforms is quite demanding of time and resources in itself. Is the use of stakeholder platforms just another project-led approach? Who will take responsibility for facilitating these platforms when we are gone?
• Is our focus on planted fodder and improving feed supply for production of livestock commodities untenable in a food insecure area?

Read more and comment … (ILRI Fodder Adoption Project) See his video interview on this topic (Blip.tv)

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Early in October you may have noticed some changes to the ILRI web site – the front page mainly, but also a few other pages.

Apart from some design and layout changes, the biggest change is the way we use dynamic content from different sources to build up these web pages.

This dynamic combining of different content streams is part of what many people call ‘web 2.0’ or the ‘social web’. It is a fundamentally different approach to publishing, sharing and communicating on the Internet. It helps us make all kinds of information and knowledge more accessible. It allows us to ‘decentralize’ the creation and sharing of our information.

We will be making much more use of such tools and approaches as we move towards a new website in the first quarter of 2010.

We are also introducing a lot of other ways to share and communicate our knowledge, including:

1. RSS Newsfeeds. You will begin to see some small orange icons with the word ‘subscribe’ on our website (and across the web generally). If you click on these buttons, you can sign up to receive automatic alerts each time the service is updated. These alerts can be through email or an newsreader like google or bloglines. This link on our website takes you to some newsfeeds that you can subscribe to: http://bit.ly/8F3vlg.
2. Photos. All across ILRI, we ahve numerous photos. Until recently, we tried to capture a lot of these in an internal database – that was rather underused.  To try and make the photos more visible – and more used – we have set up an ILRI account at http://www.flickr.com/photos/ilri/sets/.
3. Presentations. One of the most used, and often most difficult to retrieve output from our work is the powerpoint presentation. Hundreds are created and delivered each year, they usually remain on our laptops or usb sticks. We have started to collect and share some of these at http://www.slideshare.net/ilri – using the possibilities of this specialized tool. In time, we hope to publish all our powerpoints – and posters – here.
4. Video and audio. We traditionally publish a lot of text, enlivened perhaps with photos. We also made some video and film and recorded audio, but it was costly and technically difficult to share this online. This has all changed and we have many more ways to communicate and publish using online video and audio. You can see some ILRI video at http://ilri.blip.tv (they are also on YouTube); we have also started to produce some audio podcasts at http://ilri.libsyn.com.
5. Publications and reports. We have begun work on a complete repository of institutional outputs, using Dspace: http://dspace.ilri.org:8080/jspui/ . In line with institutional and donor requirements that we have a complete inventory of our various research outputs, we aim to index and collect them all in our repository – named Mahider. The strength of the Dspace system is that it allows us not just to collect and index outputs, we can also publish alerts and RSS feeds for use on our other websites and the content is automatically harvested by AGRIS, Google, CABI, etc. The repository is not yet complete. We aim to be complete for 2009 in early January, we will migrate records for older outputs in 2010.
6. Google Books. For older documents and books, we – and other CGIAR Centers – are working with Google Books to make full text versions of all our reports and publications available. Search the 500 plus online books at http://bit.ly/23sajV.
7. Calendar of events. We have begun to use Google calendar to track and present upcoming events on our Addis Ababa and Nairobi campuses. We also track relevant events organised by others that are relevant to our work. Our calendars are online (http://bit.ly/4GhfrV) – you can also add our events to your own Google calendar.

A fundamental benefit from using these tools is their openness. Anything we put into them is normally open for all to view. Anything we put in can normally be re-used and embedded back on other web sites. So our photos on Flickr or presentations on slideshare can be part of a blog story or used on a Theme or project web site. The principle we aim to follow is ‘create once, re-use often.’

The end result should be that ILRI – and our partners – can all publish, share, access, and re-use  a wider range of information and knowledge ‘outputs’ from ILRI, in much easier ways than in the past. We will also have a much better insight into how they are being used, and who by.

This work is a joint effort by staff in our knowledge managmenrt and information services and public awareness groups, with strong support from our colleagues in IT.

Story by Peter Ballantyne

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On 12 November 2009, Prof Gebisa Ejeta, winner of the 2009 World Food Prize, contributed to a ‘Dialogue on Agricultural Development in Ethiopia’.

Organized in his honor by the Ethiopian Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, the Dialogue was opened by H.E. Ato Girma Woldegiorgis, President of Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, with a welcome address from H.E. Ato Teferra Derebew, Minister for Agriculture and Rural Development.

The program included the following presentations.

• ‘Enhancing Science-based Development in Africa: Where Does Ethiopia Stand? – Prof Gebisa Ejeta
• ‘Achievements and Challenges in Ethiopian Agriculture’ – H.E. Dr. Abera Deresa, State Minister, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development
• ‘The Role of Agricultural Institutions of Higher Learning in Producing the Next Generation Agricultural Leaders in Ethiopia – Dr Solomon Assefa, Director General, Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research
• ‘The Role of Agricultural Universities in Creating the Next Generation of Agricultural Leaders in Ethiopia’ – Prof Belay Kassa, President, Haramaya University

These presentations were followed by a panel discussion with contributions from H. E. Tumusiime Rhoda Peace (African Union Commission), Dr. Mata Chipeta (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations); Dr. Carlos Seré (International Livestock Research Institute); and Dr. Yilma Kebede (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation).

The Dialogue closed with remarks by Dr. Connie Freeman (International Development Research Centre), Dr. Bashir Jama (Alliance for a Green Revolution for Africa), and Dr. Berhane Gebre Kidan.

Support for the Dialogue honouring Prof Ejeta was provided by the Ethiopian Government as well as the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, the Canadian International Development Agency, the International Development Research Centre (Canada), the International Livestock Research Institute, the Japanese International Cooperation Agency, OXFAM America, OXFAM Great Britain and the United States Agency for International Development.

For more information about Prof Gebisa Ejeta, this year’s World Food Prize Laureate, please go to: World Food Prize Laureate.

See presentations and photos from the dialogue.

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