Wellington Ekaya

In the last six years, the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) has hosted 206 undergraduate interns in its programs across the institute, including 115 men and 91 women originating from 11 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. The students, mostly from faculties of agriculture, veterinary sciences and environmental sciences, spend three to six months working within ILRI for academic credit and as part of their graduation requirements.

Internships are short-term academic training for young professionals who join ILRI for a short period during their penultimate or final year as an undergraduate. It is a time when they get a life-changing opportunity to connect the theory learned in class to real hands-on experience. Based on the experience and tasks prescribed by the student’s university, each intern gets paired with one or two ILRI scientists. By participating alongside the daily activities of the scientists—whether it be lab-based, field-based, seminars or research management activities—the students get a deeper understanding of critical livestock challenges and how scientists are tackling these.

Former interns report that it is often during the internship that they really learned to appreciate the multiple and important roles of livestock in the lives of the world’s poorest populations. They also learned about the important work ILRI is doing transforming lives through livestock. For many of these students, it is during the internship that they work for the first time with such a large team of researchers from so many disciplines, countries and cultures.

Hosting an intern is an exciting experience for ILRI scientists/mentors, too. Having young inquisitive minds involved in a project gives scientists a feeling, as one of them said, of ‘helping to grow our next generation of scientists, including future ILRI scientists’. Another scientist noted how rewarding it is to see how students, during the three or six months in the program, make decisions regarding their career path.

One outstanding example of the program’s success is Emily Ouma, an agricultural economist working with the policies, institutions and livelihoods (PIL) program at ILRI in Uganda. In 1998, Emily was an undergraduate intern at an ILRI-hosted program. Although many years have passed, Emily still remembers the key learning from the internship experience: namely, that livestock offer a high return on investments to farmers, especially if the markets are functioning well. ‘Livestock are a source of income and prestige, perform a savings and insurance function, and produce manure, which if managed well can be a key resource for fertilizing crop fields and generating energy’, she says. ‘Livestock are a clear demonstration of “getting more from less”.’

The few months Emily spent at ILRI shaped her future academic journey and career. After attaining a bachelor’s degree in agricultural economics from Egerton University, she returned to ILRI in 2001 as a master’s graduate fellow in the same program. She completed an MSc in 2003 and continued to PhD studies in 2004. She then returned to ILRI as a PhD graduate fellow, this time with the animal genetic resources program. She graduated in 2007 from the University of Kiel and proceeded for her postdoc to the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in 2008. Four years later she was employed by ILRI. Today, she feels she is using her scientific training to make an important contribution to people’s lives. There are many young people like Emily out there, with an untold story about the many benefits of ILRI’s internship program’.