Cattle in Africa (photo on Flickr by Jeff Haskins). Last November (2012), Jimmy Smith, director general of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), took part in a conference, Food Security in Africa: Bridging Research and Practice, held in Sydney, Australia, to launch the Australian International Food Security Centre (AIFSC). At the conference, the AIFSC announced an … Continue reading
Category Archives: Africa
The ‘happy strategies’ game: Matching land and water interventions with community and landscape needs
In mid 2011, Catherine Pfeifer, ILRI/IWMI researcher in the Nile Basin Development Challenge (NBDC), posed us a challenge: What kind of exercise could we do that would combine ‘expert’ knowledge of land and water practices with the needs of ‘landscapes’ and communities where these could be applied. The result should be some validated ‘best bet’ … Continue reading
Livestock and global change: Livestock live talk at ILRI on 28 November 2012
Globally, the demand for meat products is growing at 1.8% per year due to increasing populations, economic growth and rapid urbanization. Agropastoral and pastoral systems cover 45% of the earth’s usable surface and supply 9% of global meat production, while mixed crop-livestock farming systems produce 54% of the total meat and 90% of the milk … Continue reading
Management of globally significant endemic ruminant livestock in Senegal
This report on Sustainable management of globally significant endemic ruminant livestock in West Africa: Estimate of livestock demographic parameters in Senegal was released by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) in August 2012. Authored by Maria Ejlertsen, Jane Poole and Karen Marshall, it describes the results of a 12-month survey to estimate livestock demographic parameters of endemic … Continue reading
African agriculture: Basket case or bread basket?
(Illustration on Flickr by Vintaga Posters.) Is Africa an agricultural basket case, or a potential bread basket? Michael Moran, in the GlobalPost, argues the case for the latter. ‘. . . Food security remains a problem in Malawi, as elsewhere in the so-called Guinea Savannah—a huge belt of arable (and largely untilled) land with unpredictable … Continue reading
ILRI-BecA student Samuel Mutiga receives Norman E. Borlaug ‘Leadership Enhancement in Agriculture Fellowship’
Samuel Mutiga has been selected as a Fellow for the Leadership Enhancement in Agriculture Program (LEAP) of the Norman E. Borlaug International Agricultural Science and Technology Fellows Program. Samuel, a PhD student at the Cornell University, USA, is currently attached to the BecA-ILRI Hub’s Capacity and Action for Aflatoxin Reduction in Eastern Africa (CAAREA) project. … Continue reading
‘Zoonoses’–diseases that pass from animals to humans–are again making headlines
An initiative called the Dynamic Drivers of Disease in Africa Consortium, which is hosted by the UK’s STEPS Centre, at the Institute of Development Studies, in Brighton, issued a news release today regarding the science and poverty implications of transmissions of animal-to-human diseases. This comes upon reports by UK officials this week of a the … Continue reading
Segenet Kelemu receives prestigious TWAS award in Tianjin, China
The Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS) awarded Segenet Kelemu the 2011 TWAS Prize for Agricultural Sciences during the 23rd TWAS General Meeting in Tianjin during the 23rd TWAS General Meeting in Tianjin on Tuesday 18 September. Read more about this on the BecA-ILRI Hub website Watch a video clip of the award ceremony … Continue reading
New MDGs 2.0 Report – What Does the World Really Want?
The UN-led process for determining the next round of global development goals is officially underway. This will be an extremely important effort, which will likely have profound implications for both the developing and developed world for decades. Against this backdrop, the ONE Campaign and other groups have been advocating for a radical, yet extremely simple, … Continue reading
Participatory smallholder dairy value chain development in Ethiopia
This case study on Participatory smallholder dairy value chain development in Fogera woreda, Ethiopia: Experiences from IPMS project interventions by Tilahun Gebey, Tesfaye Lemma, Dirk Hoekstra, Azage Tegegne and Bogale Alemu was released by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) in July 2012. Market-oriented smallholder dairy in Fogera has an opportunity for growth because of … Continue reading