ILRI News

Contest call for case studies describing innovations in technology, community and household practices that result in better management of water and livestock resources.
 
The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) in collaboration with the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) and the CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food (CPWF) invites individuals and organizations located in any of the ten riparian countries of the Nile River Basin to submit short well-written case studies describing traditional or contemporary innovations in  technology, community and household practices, and policy, that result in better management of water and livestock resources.

The call is for studies that capture innovations and 'bright spot' studies demonstrating water-livestock management innovations that people are using now and those that have been in use for a long time.
 

Innovations in livestock and water development

Closing date for submissions is 6 August 2006.

Participants at the Africa Fertilizer Summit held in Abuja, Nigeria, 9-13 June 2006 heard how livestock manure is protecting soils across West Africa's dryland farming systems.
 
Innovative policies and practices are turning around Africa's soil fertility decline. Reversing the decline is vital if farmers are to have a chance to improve their livelihoods through more intensive agricultural production. Livestock are key to protecting Africa’s soils. Even modest increases in the use of livestock manure and fertilizers could trigger an African Green Revolution.

A policy research conference on Pastoralism and Poverty Reduction in East Africa is being held in Nairobi 27-28 June 2006 to synthesize current knowledge and recommend strategies and policies for East Africa's troubled arid lands.
 
ILRI and its co-organizers will pull together an integrated set of studies that, as an ensemble, synthesize the latest policy-relevant knowledge on the livelihood issues facing pastoralists and strategies and policies that could reduce poverty over the long term in East Africa’s arid and semi-arid lands.

Research institutions in eastern and southern Africa are changing the way they do business to unleash innovations.
 
Research institutions in eastern and southern Africa are changing the way they do business. They aim to make dramatic impacts on poverty by doing so. In tackling problems like climate change jointly, these institutions are aligning their programs, sharing their services and developing research platforms to provide easy access to people, knowledge, equipment and innovative institutional arrangements.

The sixth and most recent consultation in a series of meetings held over the last 12 months—including three formal workshops and over 200 people from national institutes, universities, other research partners and centres of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR)—was held 24-25 May.

The integrated medium-term plan for eastern and southern Africa that these partners are co-creating will allow them to work effectively as one system. Their plan involves a Network Cluster comprising the 15 CGIAR centres and their African partners facilitated by a Network Hub operating virtually to help the dispersed groups in the region clarify and meet their needs. The start up plan will be refined and submitted to the CGIAR Science Council in June 2006.

The designated focal points for centres and partners involved in developing this plan are excited about what they are accomplishing and the momentum they are building. The CGIAR was an institutional innovation when it was created four decades ago. By aligning itself with its partners to ‘unleash innovations’-in strategy, structure, support systems, skills and shared values-it looks to be so again.

A new paper by ILRI describes new scientific tools and platforms to tackle new issues emerging in collaborative livestock research for development.

The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) recently reviewed its strategy, evolution and research agenda. The resulting paper, Knowledge to Action—Strategy and Future Directions of ILRI, answers four questions:

1. What is ILRI doing and why does it matter?
2. How is ILRI responding to dynamic livestock, science and development environments?
3. What are the future research directions and frontiers for ILRI?
4. Why invest in international livestock research?

This analysis included an assessment of ILRI’s achievements over the past five years: ILRI’s Achievements: 2000–2006.

Dynamic growth of the livestock sector in the developing world is creating new opportunities. The challenge is to use the ‘livestock revolution’ driver to achieve pro-poor growth. Rapidly changing consumer demands, expanding markets for livestock products, changing food quality and safety demands, new technologies, and institutional innovations such as the supermarket revolution all create both opportunities and challenges for reducing poverty through livestock interventions.

ILRI’s Knowledge to Action paper describes the evolution of ILRI’s research program, new directions for each of the institute’s five research themes, and research areas ILRI and its partners recently established to address global issues such as emerging and zoonotic diseases, increasingly stringent food quality and safety standards, and the environmental impacts and trade-offs of changing livestock systems. ILRI and its partners are developing research platforms to enable all stakeholders in livestock development to apply the tools of new science and technology in pursuit of a shared livestock-research-for-development agenda.