The IPMS project held its semi-annual steering committee meeting in Addis Ababa on April 17, 2012. Representatives from the Oromia, SNNP and Tigray bureau’s of agriculture/research; IPMS RDOs; CIDA representatives; and IPMS headquarters staff attended. Iain Wright, Director of PLE and DG representative in Ethiopia chaired the meeting. The main agendas of the day were i) survey results of the IPMS project impact, ii) IPMS activities in the past six months (October 2011 – March 2012) and iii) proposed activities for the coming nine months (April – December 2012) of the no cost project extension.

Berhanu Gebremedhin, senior economist of IPMS, presented the project impact on each commodity IPMS intervened on and crosscutting issues like HIV/AIDS and gender mainstreaming. Valuable experiences and lessons learnt both by smallholder farmers and IPMS researchers and development practitioners over the years were highlighted on Berhanu’s presentation.

One of the highlights IPMS’ activities in the past six months is training and execution of mass insemination of dairy cows in the four regions. This intervention, which is an action research for IPMS as well, attracted a lot of attention and commitment from the regional governments. Tigray region has moved quickly in scaling out this intervention by allocating a huge budget (20 million birr) for mass insemination in Tigray.  In the past two months, a rigorous mass insemination campaign was carried out, which resulted in the insemination of 12,500 cows of smallholder farmers in Tigray. Oromia, SNNP and Amhara regions are actively moving on this as well.

The afternoon session started with a visit to the mobile cattle crush (animal handling facility), constructed by ILRI’s physical plant unit with very close supervision from Dirk and Azage. The cattle crush is designed and constructed in such a way that it increases efficiency of the service delivery by technicians and reduce stress of the animals during the process.

In the remaining nine months of IPMS, further work on capacity development in the education and extension system on issues of mass insemination and other IPMS interventions; promotion and documentation of results; and other knowledge management activities are planned.

Story by: Fanos Mekonnen