International Women’s Day

On International Women’s Day (8 March), People and Organizational Development (P&OD) organized a special event to highlight the occasion. I gave a short presentation on diversity and inclusion in the workplace to set the scene, which then led into other presentations and discussions on gender in the workplace at ILRI and gender in our research.

I have not seen much of the view from my office this month as I have been travelling most of March to Uganda, Nigeria and the USA – I am writing this on the last flight of my travels, returning home to Nairobi.

Uganda

The Institute Management Committee (IMC) travelled to Uganda on 14-17 March. We spent the first day meeting with our key stakeholders in the country, including the government, along with our Ugandan team. The morning session focused on the achievements of the research on pig value chains carried out under the Livestock and Fish CRP over the past few years. For me the main highlights were seeing 1) the considerable progress made by ILRI and our partners in identifying the main constraints along the pig value chain and the progress made in identifying and testing technical and institutional interventions to overcome these, 2) the very strong partnerships that have been developed with research institutions, national and local government, NGOs, producer organizations and the private sector, that has really catalyzed all the players in the sector to come together to drive pig value chain development and 3) the enthusiasm and strong commitment of the partners we work with.

Demand for pork in Uganda is growing rapidly and is now the highest in East Africa (3.4 kg per capita per year).  This provides a huge opportunity for small-scale producers, especially women, to keep a few pigs and generate income by supplying the growing market.

The afternoon session concentrated on ILRI’s future plans for Uganda and a discussion on the Government Livestock Sector Prioritization in Uganda under the new Agriculture Sector Strategic Plan.

Following the IMC meeting on 15-16 March we visited Mukono District on 17 March to see the work being implemented by ILRI, including research on production, marketing and food safety. I was particularly impressed when a group of pork traders told us that their sales has increased from 20kg to 50Kg per day as a result of training they had received from ILRI.

Nigeria

21-25 March saw me at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), Ibadan in Nigeria, at a program management committee meeting of the Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH) CRP, along with Delia Grace and Silvia Alonso (with Eric Févre joining part of the meeting remotely). The main focus of the meeting was planning for the second phase of the CRP and in particular achieving greater synergies across the flagships, stronger collaboration among the participating Centres and ramping up resource mobilization. A4NH comprises five flagships Food Systems for Healthier Diets, Biofortification, Food safety, Supporting Policies, Programs, and Enabling Action through Research, and Improving Human Health with Delia Grace leading Food Safety and Eric Févre co-leading Improving Human Health with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). We also have a strong interest in the Food Systems flagship led by Inge Brouwer of Wageningen University and discussions are ongoing with Inge on how we can strengthen our engagement with the flagship, especially on human nutrition. We are planning a joint meeting with LSHTM in May to strengthen and begin to institutionalize our partnership.

While at IITA, I took the opportunity to visit the ILRI office on the campus and have discussions with Tunde Amole, our country representative and animal nutritionist. Tunde and I met with IITA to discuss how ILRI can support the IITA-led Youth Agripreneurs Program which supports young people to develop the skills to enter agriculture. There is interest in extending the scheme into livestock, including poultry and small ruminants and we are exploring appropriate business models with IITA.

University of Florida

From Nigeria I flew to the University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida for the first annual meeting of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Feed the Future Innovation Lab on Livestock Systems (or Livestock Systems Innovation Lab, or LSIL as it is more commonly known. This is one of several research programs funded by USAID and managed by US universities. ILRI is part of the management of the Lab, I am on the External Advisory Board, we coordinate the activities in the different regions where the Lab has research activities. Emily Ouma leads a dairy project in Rwanda and we received notification two weeks ago that the Animal and Human Health team has won a project on food safety in Cambodia. The meeting brought together the management team and the Principal Investigators (PIs) and Co-PIs of the funded projects in Ethiopia, Rwanda and Nepal (the projects in Cambodia are still being finalized and a call for Niger and Burkina Faso will be released soon). The lab has assembled an impressive array of projects which were presented, followed by a meeting of the External Advisory Board. While the Board had some comments and suggestions on the strategic focus of the program, we were impressed by the good progress made in year one.

Global Nutrition Symposium

During the week, the Innovation Lab organized the 2017 Global Nutrition Symposium.
There were a series of excellent presentations on the role of animal source foods on human nutrition, including a presentation by Jimmy on ‘The role of livestock in food and nutrition security’. I provided some concluding comments on an excellent event. The whole event was recorded and can be viewed here. If you want to find out more about the importance of animal source foods in supplying quality protein, Vitamin A, the B Vitamins, minerals like iron, iodine and zinc, especially during the ‘first 1000 days’, I thoroughly recommend that you spend some time viewing the recording.

Till next month.

Iain