Tagline: Champion: Team: Earlier this year, to celebrate International Women’s Day, on 8 March, ILRI compiled twoWILD (Women-In-Livestock-Development) Pinterest Boards: (1) Profiles of women at (or formerly with) ILRI WILD: Women in Livestock Development (200 pins to date) https://www.pinterest.com/susan_macmillan/wild-women-in-livestock-development/ (2) Profiles of women in related research and development work that have never worked for ILRI but […]
Idea pool
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Increase productivity and resilience of livestock production in dry land by improving disease control and breeding
Tagline: Champion: Team: Research on dry land is strategic place for ILRI to expand its research and development portfolio and Polly suggested her idea on forage management for dry land. In this virtual meeting, there are some discussion among Polly, Lance, Karen, Isabelle, et al. suggesting/implying that ILRI can study and improve disease control and […]
Virtual vets
Tagline: Champion: Team: Latest developments in ICTs offer a whole range of possibilities for surveillance, feedback to farmers and through that improve delivery of animal health services. However, there is still a shortage of expert veterinarians in the locations where it is needed. Therefore this project aims to use ICT tools for veterinary experts advising […]
PPPs for P3 (pigs, poultry, people)- the One Farm approach in Uganda and Vietnam
Tagline: Champion: Team: Supporting smallholders requires more than only looking at one part of their production system. A wider approach looking at the whole farm helps to capitalize on cross-value chain linkages. To ensure sustainable income generation and increase resilience through diversification, we propose to explore possibilities for public-private partnerships addressing several issues on farms […]
Towards Sustainable Diversification
Tagline: Champion: Team: The challenge to the near future is to meet the demand for food under the presence of growing global population, political instabilities, economic and social changes and limited resource availability. It is no longer possible to rely on agricultural expansion via acquiring new and productive lands with the purpose of feeding future […]
Safe food, fair food
Tagline: Champion: Team: Sustainability and scalability- the Holy Grail of CG research and the darling of donors – and one that has often eluded livestock interventions; but what if we had already found the secret, only we hadn’t noticed? In this idea note we argue that ILRI’s approach to food safety in informal markets has […]
Biogas – Do we need it in Vietnam?
Tagline: Champion: Team: There is no efficient and adequate animal waste treatment in Vietnam, which leads to increasing environmental issues associated with the productive process. Most of the waste from intensive farming systems have become externalities for farmers as well as to the rest of society. It is known that animal waste produces methane gas, […]
Quick and easy system for predicting tailored feeding requirement for dairy cattle in small holder system
Tagline: Champion: Team: In developed countries feeding standards are established and published for several species of livestock. These standards are application to most farmers because management is homogeneous and breeds well defined. However this is not the case for small holders farmers here in Africa. Given limited resources in the small holder, a quick method […]
Curbing antimicrobial use in agriculture
Tagline: Champion: Team: One of the major public health challenges faced by humanity this century is the development of antimicrobial resistance in many important pathogens. Beyond the abuse antibiotics in medicine, the burgeoning use of antimicrobials in livestock production is exacerbating this problem. Demand growth in developing economies (especially the BRICS countries) is driving a […]
Plant diseases in Forage productivity
Tagline: Champion: Team: Forages are the key for better livestock production. So, the higher amount of forage production is very important for the farmers. If the productivity will be high then the cost of the forages in the market will be less and ultimately it affects the cost of production of livestock, which benefits the […]
Evidence based research to foster integration of system based interventions
Tagline: Champion: Team: Integration is a very important and key term in the implementation of project initiatives at various scales. We can minimize wastage of resources and duplication of efforts if we integrate our research approaches. However, the practical application of “Integration” within institutions and projects, and between institutions and projects is far behind. There […]
A generic indicator framework for “measuring” sustainability
Tagline: Champion: Team: There are two key questions that we are trying to answer about sustainability: How sustainable is this plot / household / community in comparison with other plots / households / communities? If we change something, does the sustainability of the plot / household / community change and, if so, in what way […]
ILRI’s own Co-working Space
Tagline: Champions: Team: Vision: A co-working hub to facilitate innovation We create a state-of-the-art Co-Working Space—with stimulating atmosphere, good WIFI and strong coffee—that encourages new conversations, new ideas, new research collaborations, and new ways of doing business. We do this by transforming the InfoCentre from a large comfortable traditional space for quiet work into a large, stimulating, co-working hub […]
Towards a Sustainability Indicators document
Tagline: Champion: Team: ILRI developed in the past the ‘Gender, livestock and livelihoods indicators’ document‘ that has been instrumental in systematically collecting and analyzing such data on these topics. BMGF refers to it for example in their performance indicators document. On the other hand, we are many at ILRI working on ‘sustainability’, at farm, community, watershed […]
Research for the market place
Tagline: Champion: Team: As we conduct our science, it is important that we have a bird eye view on the continuum stretching from production to usage. Here are three questions that may help us as we ponder. What are our research products? – Our current research strategy may largely revolve around this question. Despite this […]
More Integration / More Collaboration among ourselves
Tagline: Champion: Team: The need for more integration / collaboration among ourselves across projects / programs is considered to be crucial as we envision the way forward. Maybe it is time to assess our organizational structure, identify where the ‘connections’ are missing, and then jointly establish the linkages with a workable processes put in place […]
Learning from the past, looking to the future…
Tagline: Champion: Team: ILRI has a long standing history in the development of vaccine and diagnostic tools. For those of us who have joined ILRI in the last few years we get to hear about those exciting lab experiments and how much ILRI has contributed to improved technologies. Then, however, we often get also to […]
Connecting humans, one health and greenhouse gas emissions
Tagline: Champions: Team: This study brings together (or integrates) four key areas of ILRI’s work: it aims to understand the connections between household characteristics and livestock management practices, livestock and human health and greenhouse gas emission. It focuses on understanding what and how household characteristics (e.g. education, household composition, access to inputs, livelihood strategies by […]
What farmers really really need
Tagline: Champion: Team: Many times our research is not informed by what exactly farmers need to increase livestock production but what researchers think is right for farmers.We consult with them, and allow them to advise us, but still it is us who determine the research agenda, and what happens with the results. This does not […]
Climate smart livestock systems
Tagline: Developing and testing climate smart livestock solutions Champion: Jean Hanson Team: ASSP and Feed and Forage Biosciences team Climate change scenarios predict a very different world in 2050 with reduced and more erratic rainfall in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, posing challenges for livestock production systems and those who depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. Research on solutions for […]
Forage into Use
Tagline: Champion: Team: Forage into Use: transformation of the forage sector in East and Southern Africa for improved productivity and reduced environmental footprint of livestock Forages are sorely underused in SSA. Too much time has been spent on traditional technology push approaches. A fresh systems level approach is needed. Application of this new approach could […]
Bridge seminars: Boosting cooperation across research areas
Tagline: Champion: Team: “Bridge seminars” (and exploring teams) to boost cooperation across research areas that various people are working on We are all busy with our ongoing team work, projects etc. This IPM is revealing some gaps in communication, cooperation, collaboration across our programs and teams. Here is an idea that could bridge that gap […]
PPPs for developing the capacity of smallholder farmers
Tagline: Champion: Team: Public-private partnerships (PPPs) have been defined as a collaborative venture between the public and private sectors built on the expertise of each partner that best meets clearly defined goals through the appropriate allocation of resources, risks and rewards (World Economic Forum, 2005). PPPs may provide knowledge sharing, technical support, training or linkages […]
Linking host-pathogen interactions with productivity
There is a need to better understand host-pathogen interactions in case of multiple infections, for example presence of various endemic diseases, incl. parasites, viral, and bacterial pathogens, and how these link to productivity (milk-yield, reproductive performance, growth rates, feed conversion ratios, etc). Implementing a project where herd productivity and presence of various pathogen are linked with […]
Thermostabilization of PPR Live Vaccine re-visited
Tagline: Champion: Team: Peste des petits ruminants (PPR) is a contagious, acute viral and economically important disease of sheep and goats that is caused by the virus of the genus Morbillivirus and is characterised by high mortality (Furley, et al. 1987 Vet Rec 121(19): 443-447). ILRI is among the institutions that are committed to having […]
Improved ECF live vaccine
Tagline: Champion: Team: Given the effectiveness of the current live ECF Vaccine over a wide range of presumably different antigenic variants of the parasites and cattle types, and given that we have now have the full T.parva genome is it possible by using what is referred to as gene editing to modify the parasite genome […]
Investing in resilience through stakeholder platforms
Tagline: Champion: Team: Informed investments to improve resilience of people and ecosystems in pastoral areas through enhanced cross-scales stakeholder platforms The financial and psychological burden of climate, economic, political and sanitary shocks remain high. In the Sahel, for example, repetitive droughts (1968-74, 1983-84, 2002-03, 2005, 2009, 2010) have had serious impacts on human and animal […]
African Livestock Phenomics Facility
Tagline: Champion: Team: Phenomics has been been described as the next big challenge, with our ability to characterize phenomes (the full set of phenotypes of an individual) now significantly lagging behind our ability to characterize genomes (see Nature Review Genetics 2010 11:855-66). We need a state of the art African-based facility for measuring livestock phenotypes International efforts […]
Improved forage management for dryland livestock value chains
Tagline: Champion: Team: Producing innovation solutions to the perplexing puzzle of linking forage management to livestock value chains in drylands Extensive livestock production systems have developed to optimise livestock access to forage, with herders using mobility as the primary means of ensuring their animals have enough to eat, and also that grazing area is not […]
Diverting aflatoxins from humans to less susceptible species
Tagline: Champion: Team: Although the ultimate goal is to reduce aflatoxins overall, we need now to research different alternate uses. Here, animal feed may be a way to go, and we should perform feeding trials to see how we safely could feed contaminated feed to livestock, either by itself, or using binders or biocontrol measures, […]
The impact of mycotoxins on human health- bridging the knowledge gaps
Tagline: Champion: Team: Although aflatoxins has been extensively studied for decades, there are still fundamental knowledge gaps in the effects of the toxins on human and animal health, especially in interaction with other mycotoxins. In order to evaluate this, we need to team up with medical institutes and perform randomized clinical trials, with impact measurements, […]
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