ILRI livestock insurance innovation highlighted at launch of Kenya Government’s ‘Open Data Web Portal’

Posted on July 9, 2011 by Paul Karaimu

ILRI’s Bruce Scott and Andrew Mude (right) discuss ILRI’s use of open data with Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki (centre), Minister for Information and Communication Samuel Pogishio (centre left), Permanent Secretary Ministry of Information and Communication Bitange Ndemo (centre right), and other dignitaries when they visited ILRI’s booth at the launch of the Kenya Government’s ‘Open Data Web Portal’ on 8 Jul 2011 in Nairobi (photo credit: ILRI/Njiru).

An ‘Index-Based Livestock Insurance’ project led by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) was today (8 July 2011) highlighted as one of the successful, innovative and technology-driven initiatives using open data to create solutions that contribute towards helping Kenya achieve its long-term national development plan.

Speaking during the presidential launch of the ‘Kenya Government Open Data Web portal’ at Nairobi’s Kenyatta International Conference Centre, Andrew Mude, a scientist with ILRI who leads the Index-Based Livestock Insurance project, described how the project has developed an insurance model for pastoralist livestock keepers using open data. The project uses satellite-based readings of forage cover to find out how much fodder is available for livestock in northern Kenya and the data is combined with livestock mortality data from the Kenya Arid Lands Management project to predict livestock deaths against which livestock herders can insure themselves.

‘This model allows us to predict the current state of livestock mortality in northern Kenya. It currently shows there is a high livestock mortality rate in Marsabit District, which means that insurance may be paid to pastoralists this year,’ said Mude. Marsabit District, in Kenya’s northern drylands, is currently facing a severe drought that is also affecting Somalia and southern Ethiopia, in the Horn of Africa.

Stared in January 2010, the Index-Based Livestock Insurance project is insuring over 2600 households in Marsabit, which is helping livestock keepers there to sustain their livelihoods. The project is supported by the World Bank, the UK Department for International Development and the United States Agency for International Development, among other donors. It has received considerable support from the Kenya Government and recently received the Vision 2030 ICT award for ‘solutions that drive economic development as outlined in Kenya’s Vision 2030.’

Kenya President Mwai Kibaki officially opened the Kenya Government Open Data portal. He said the new open data platform would allow policymakers and researchers to find timely information to guide-decision making. ‘This launch is an important step towards ensuring government information is made readily available to Kenyans and will allow citizens to track the delivery of services,’ Kibaki said.

The new Kenya Government Open Data Web portal will make available to the public several large government datasets, including information on population, education, healthcare and government spending in an easy to search and view format. The portal will allow Kenyans to search and display national and county-level data in graphs and maps for easy comparison and analysis of information.

The launch brought together government officials, policymakers and ICT-sector players who are using open data to build applications that take information closer to Kenyans. Among today’s presentations was the National Council for Law Reporting Kenya Law Reports website, which is making available to the public for the first time the Kenya Gazette (from 1899 to 2011) and all of Kenya’s parliamentary proceedings since 1960.

‘Open data leads to open knowledge, which leads to open solutions and open development,’ said Johannes Zutt, World Bank Country Director for Kenya, who shared lessons from the World Bank’s experience and said open data can ‘fuel innovation in Kenya’s technology sector.’

‘This is a turning point in Kenya’s history,’ said Bruce Scott, ILRI’s director of Partnerships and Communications. ‘Kenya is among the first African countries that have made available this kind of information to their citizens online; this will empower its people in line with the country’s new constitution. ILRI is happy to be associated with this event.’

For more information about IBLI see the following.
ILRI news articles
https://newsarchive.ilri.org/archives/5000
https://newsarchive.ilri.org/archives/3180

Short video
http://blip.tv/ilri/development-of-the-world-s-first-insurance-for-african-pastoralist-herders-3776231

To read more about the Kenya Open Data portal, visit their website:
http://www.opendata.go.ke

Visit the IBLI project website

ILRI livestock insurance project features in presidential launch of Kenya Government’s ‘Open Data Web Portal’

Posted on July 8, 2011 by Paul Karaimu

The Index-Based Livestock Insurance project, which works with pastoral livestock keepers in Kenya’s Marsabit District, is being highlighted in a launch on 8 July 2011 of the Kenya Government’s Open Data Web portal (photo credit: ILRI/Mude).

Andrew Mude, a scientist with the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) who leads an ‘Index-Based Livestock Insurance’ project, on 8 July 2011 will describe how his project is using satellite imagery to provide the first livestock insurance to pastoral livestock herders in Kenya’s northern drylands. He is making this presentation at the launch of a new Kenya Government Open Data Web portal. The launch will be opened by Kenya President Mwai Kibaki at the Kenyatta International Conference Centre, in Nairobi’s city centre.

The Index-Based Livestock Insurance project is a novel scheme that provides livestock insurance against animal losses to over 2000 households in Kenya’s Marsabit District. This insurance product, the first to ever be offered in the district, is helping livestock keepers to sustain their livelihoods during droughts. The project was started by ILRI in partnership with UAP insurance and Equity Bank, along with other partners, in January 2010.

The new Kenya Government Open Data Web portal is one of the first in sub-Saharan Africa and it will, for the first time, make several large government datasets available to the public in an easy to search and view format. The portal will allow Kenyans to search and display national and county-level data in graphs and maps and allow for easy comparison and analysis of information.

The launch of Kenya Government Open Web portal is also bringing together over 30 exhibitors who will showcase their use of technology to share information. ILRI has an exhibit showcasing its Index-Based Livestock Insurance project.

Use of open-source technology to store, analyze, manage and display data is on the rise in Kenya and recently received a boost with the launching of Virtual Kenya, a new website that hosts maps and spatial data about the country, making them available for use by citizens. Started by Upande Ltd., a Nairobi-based technology company, Virtual Kenya, has expressed interest in hosting some of the data generated by ILRI’s Index-Based Livestock Insurance project to demonstrate how open-source technologies are improving information access in the country.

Map showing the critically low forage availability in Kenya’s Marsabit District in June 2011; the entire district is at acute (red) to severe (black) low levels of forage to feed the district’s many livestock (map by ILRI’s Index-Based Livestock Insurance project and made available on the Virtual Kenya website).

One such map generated by data from the Index-Based Livestock Insurance project is already available on the Virtual Kenya website. The map shows viewers that in the current severe drought affecting northern Kenya, as well as southern Ethiopia and Somalia, throughout Marsabit District livestock forage availability is at acutely to severely low levels. That is, the amount of forage available to feed the pastoral livestock herds that support most people’s livelihoods in this district is significantly below long-run averages for this time of year, indicating that many of the domesticated livestock are expected to starve. (The next rains in the region are not due until October.)

In April 2011, ILRI’s Index-Based Livestock Insurance project won the Vision 2030 ICT Innovation Award for ‘the overall best innovation for their mobile-ICT-based livestock insurance solution.’ This award event was organized by the Kenya ICT board and the Kenya Vision 2030 Delivery Secretariat, which said the ILRI project was ‘a promising and exciting innovation in insurance design that allows the risk-management benefits of insurance to be made available to poor and remote clients.’

The Index-Based Livestock Insurance project also won a best-practice award from the Poverty Reduction, Equity and Growth Network in recognition of its innovative approach in combining scientific research and practical solutions; that award was bestowed in September 2010 in South Africa.

To find out more about the Open Data Web portal, visit the Kenya ICT board website: http://www.ict.go.ke/

Visit the IBLI project website

New initiative to boost food production in eastern Africa’s drylands

Posted on April 27, 2011 by Paul Karaimu

A boy tends cattle in Ethiopia. A new initiative supported by the Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) research program of the CGIAR will boost smallholder farmers’ resilience to drought in the Horn of Africa. (Photo credit: ILRI/Gerard)

A new initiative to help pastoralists and smallholder farmers cope with the twin pressures of drought and climate change was launched recently at the Nairobi, Kenya, headquarters of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI).

The initiative, ‘Climate change adaptation and mitigation for communities in dryland regions,’ is conducted by a group of development partners that include the Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) research program of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Vétérinaires San Frontières, Solidarites and Action Aid among others. The initiative will work towards securing the agro-pastoral livelihoods of poor livestock keepers in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia.

The meeting, held on 22 March 2011, brought together donor representatives, regional research and development partners, national research and extension representatives and non-governmental agencies engaged in promoting dryland agriculture. The meeting aimed to create awareness of the challenges facing the drylands and to share information about existing technological and institutional innovations that can address some of their most pressing challenges.

The drylands and other marginal environments of eastern Africa have high population growth and climate variability and few livelihood options other than livestock keeping. Such marginal lands around the world, however, produce about 20% of the world’s food, have rich cultural and social diversity and are inhabited by people whose traditional ways of coping with climate change can be harnessed for improved small-scale agriculture and livelihoods.

The new regional drylands initiative will help increase crop and livestock productivity in the three countries as well as add value to supply chain processes and help build supportive institutional frameworks for enhancing food production and marketing.

The initiative hopes to boost food security and livelihoods by increasing the resilience of vulnerable livestock keepers and is expected to reach about 1.3 million people at a cost of USD15 million in its first phase, which starts this year and will go on until 2013.

‘As a key partner in the project,’ said James Kinyangi, a regional program leader of CCAFS, who is based at ILRI, ‘CCAFS will apply lessons from successful past CGIAR research to intensify agricultural production in marginal environments. This should help eastern Africa’s dryland communities to develop greater resilience to climate change.’

The drylands initiative follows a workshop on dryland farming practices held in 2008 to map strategies for improving farming in eastern Africa’s drylands and identify high-priority crops for adaptation.

For more information about the regional drylands initiative visit: http://typo3.fao.org/fileadmin/user_upload/drought/docs/Dryland%20Flyer_final.pdf

To find out more about CCAFS visit: http://www.ccafs.cgiar.org/

The case for index-based livestock insurance and cash payments for northern Kenya’s pastoralists

Posted on March 22, 2011 by Susan MacMillan

ILRI is working with insurance companies to train livestock herders in Kenya’s northern drylands in the benefits and costs of a new index-based livestock insurance first made available in Marsabit District in 2010 (photo credit: ILRI/Mude).

On the second day of a ‘Future of Pastoralism in Africa’ Conference, being held this week (21–23 March 2011) in Addis Ababa at the campus of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), a panel session focused on new approaches for strengthening pastoralist livelihoods and social protection.

With decades of food aid delivery having demonstrably failed to significantly improve the livelihood prospects of Africa’s poorer pastoralists, aid agencies and governments alike are rethinking their approaches to ways of delivering aid to pastoralists. But do safety net schemes serve as life-savers or do they lock destitute pastoralists into unsustainable livelihoods? Should donors and governments help destitute pastoralists exit pastoral livelihoods? Should they help provide livestock insurance schemes?

Andrew Mude, an ILRI scientist, spoke about an index-based livestock insurance innovation that has been instituted, in partnership with UAP Insurance and Equity Bank, for pastoral herders in Marsabit District, in northern Kenya’s great drylands. This is the first insurance ever offered the Samburu, Gabra, Rendille, Borana, Turkana and other traditional herders here, who cope with variable weather by traditionally moving their stock to find new grazing when the grass in a given area is finished.

The risk covered by this insurance is periodic drought that dries up the natural rangeland vegetation, which supplies most of the feed for the pastoral cattle, sheep, goats and camels of the region, leading to many livestock deaths. Insurance payouts are made, to those who have bought annual insurance contracts, when the available forage in Marsabit District in that year drops below a level at which more than 15 per cent of the livestock would be expected to perish from starvation.

Before the ILRI team could convince commercial companies that this is a viable product, they had to convince the prospective pastoralist clients of that. So ILRI researchers invented insurance games that help livestock herders understand what the insurance covers, and what it does not, and when insurance payouts will be made, and when they will not.

Asked whether livestock insurance isn’t just another popular idea likely to fail, Mude said, ‘I wouldn’t stake my professional reputation on index livestock insurance working, but I would stake my reputation on the processes we are using to monitor the effectiveness and impacts of this new product. In fact, my team has put a “pause” on expanding livestock insurance in Kenya while we see how it goes, although we are introducing livestock insurance in Ethiopia so as to see how it does here, under different conditions.’

In the meantime, Mude’s team is monitoring the effectiveness and impacts of livestock insurance in Marsabit by following 900 households, which they first interviewed in 2009 and then again last year; they’ll continue to monitor these households over the next four years to determine if the product should be made more widely available.

The next expert to speak was Stephen Devereux, who leads a pilot Hunger Safety Net Program providing cash transfers to the people in northern Kenya’s chronically food insecure areas of Mandera, Marsabit, Turkana, Wajir districts. The payments are designed to meet basic subsistence needs. The program uses the local private sector—banks and shops—to deliver the cash to the local people.

The Hunger Safety Net Program aims to provide social assistance, insurance and justice. The first thing Devereux’s team had to consider was whether the program’s social protection should address poverty or vulnerability. The conventional way to define poverty is lack of resources, while vulnerability is characterized by uninsured risk and marginalization is a matter of lacking a voice in decision-making.

The rates of both poverty and hunger in these districts are high. Only the rich eat three times a day. Middle-income families eat just twice a day, the poor only once a day, and the very poor sometimes do not eat at all in 24 hours.

Food aid is the conventional response to prolonged drought in these as well as other pastoral areas. But food aid is not enough, and tends to be diluted through sharing. The nutritional status of children in drought-afflicted districts, moreover, was found to be alarming in 2006, for example, a full year following a drought and despite massive injections of food aid.

Among the design challenges of this social assistance is how to best target those to receive this aid: are women, for example, more responsible as well as more vulnerable? Conflicts occurring between pastoralist communities in this region are a great problem, and the food price crisis is also hurting the efficacy of this program, which can no longer provide sufficient cash to maintain adequate nutritional levels. Another worry is that the program may be trapping people in unviable livelihoods while they wait to receive benefits (some families might be better off exiting pastoralism altogether).

Complementary interventions—so-called ‘cash plus’ systems—are needed to help build resilience in these communities, said Devereux. ‘A useful integrated approach would combine cash payments with services such as livestock insurance, as is being done by ILRI and its partners in Marsabit.’

For more information, see previous postings on the ILRI News Blog:

The future of pastoralism in Africa debated in Addis: Irreversible decline or vibrant future?, 21 March 2011.

Climate change impacts on pastoralists in the Horn: Transforming the ‘crisis narrative’, 22 March 2011.

Or visit the Future Agricultures Consortium website conference page or blog.

Climate change impacts on pastoralists in the Horn: Transforming the ‘crisis narrative’

Posted on March 22, 2011 by Susan MacMillan

Shiferaw Teklemariam, Ethiopian Minister of Federal Affairs, opened a ‘Future of Pastoralism in Africa’ Conference yesterday (21 March 2011), which is organized by Tufts University and Future Agricultures Consortium and being held on the Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, campus of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI). The Minister’s talk was followed by that of Abebe Haile Gabriel, director of the African Union Department of Rural Economy and Agriculture who reminded his audience that ‘Pastoralism is nothing new but is continually forgotten.’

Ian Scoones, of the Future Agricultures Consortium and the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University, then set the scene for the conference with remarks such as the following. ‘There is a moment now, with renewed interest in pastoralism in the Africa Union, regional bodies and national governments, for evidence-based research to inform policy. Even a decade ago, we would have been urging governments and the Africa Union to give pastoralism attention. They are now taking pastoralism seriously, as a driver of growth. . . . This meeting comes in a long lineage of meetings discussing the future of pastoralism in Africa. (A meeting in 1951 in Niamey was an early one.) But recently, there has been massive change and dynamism in this continent’s pastoral areas. . . . Popular reports on pastoralism are dominated by crisis narratives. While the popular discourse continues with doom and gloom scenarios, we see dynamic change with growth—as in the livestock trade booms in the borderlands—with both winners and losers. . . .

‘The research on pastoralism in Africa has a rich tradition. Among the more classic works are the optimism displayed in the 1960s and 1970s about the transformation of pastoralism; 1980s work done by ILRI’s predecessor, ILCA (International Livestock Centre for Africa), on the Borana pastoralists of Ethiopia; the 1990s’ focus on land tenure issues and ‘disequilibrium’ in rangelands; the attention given by CRSP (Collaborative Research Support Program) and others to pastoralist poverty and livelihoods; recent emphasis on the marketing and commercialization of pastoralist livestock products; and today’s attention to the impacts of climate change, conflict and insecurity on pastoral communities. . . .

‘We want in this workshop to build on this huge body of work, to reflect on it, and to judge how robust were those findings. We want to know what new insights are suggested by today’s research and what they suggest for policymaking. . . . We want to offer possible scenarios for pastoralist areas and to do so we want to try out a simple approach. This simplistic diagram categorizes pastoralists according to whether their access to markets and resources is good or poor, as in the following.

Where pastoralist access to both markets and resources is good, there is potential for commercialization and export trade.
Where pastoralist access to both markets and resources is poor, communities should seek alternative livelihood strategies and ways to exit pastoralism.
Where pastoralist access to resources is good but to markets is poor, traditional mobile pastoralism should continue to dominate.
And where pastoralist access to markets is good but to resources is poor, ways of diversifying livelihoods and adding value to livestock products is needed.’

Impacts of climate change on pastoralist communities
Several ILRI scientists participated in a session after lunch on the impacts of climate change on pastoralism. These included Polly Ericksen, who made a presentation, Shirley Tarawali, Jan de Leeuw, Andrew Mude and David Nkedianye. The latter, a Maasai who worked with ILRI while doing his doctoral research, also made a presentation.

Polly Ericksen, of ILRI, reminded her audience that managing climate variability and climate risk is at the very heart of pastoralism. The consequences and implications of climate change are therefore of paramount importance to pastoral livelihoods, production systems and landscapes. The paper developed by Ericksen—along with her ILRI colleagues Phil Thornton, Augustine Ayantunde, Mario Herrero, Mohamed Said and Jan de Leeuw—explores what we do and do not know about how climate change will unfold in pastoral areas of sub-Saharan Africa. And it stresses the importance of successful strategies for adapting to climate change at local as well as higher governance levels for the future of pastoralism.

Among other remarks from Ericksen were the following. ‘Pastoralists of course manage well the considerable changes in climate that they experience. Pastoralism is a supreme adaption to managing climatic variability. . . . The 2009 drought in Kenya killed up to 80% of the livestock kept by the country’s pastoralists. . . . Many crop farmers in Africa’s drying regions will start to incorporate more livestock, a trend that has been occurring in West Africa for the last 2 to 3 decades. . . . New research shows that, contrary to IPCC estimates, the Kenya highlands have been getting drier and are likely to continue to dry. There is fundamental uncertainty regarding the impacts of climate change—not least because we don’t even know how we humans will manage ourselves in the face of climate change.’

Remarks by Gufu Oba, of the Norwegian University of Life Sciences: ‘The variability of Africa’s drylands—season to season, year to year, place to place—makes nonsense of theories of “carrying capacity”. . . . Pastoralists do not run away from risks: they face them straight on. And communities and individuals differ greatly in how they cope with threats. . . . Pastoralism will be less mobile in future, but pastoralism will survive: herders will not exchange their lava rocks and other dryland features for anything.’

David Nkedianye, heading a non-governmental organization called ‘Reto-o-Reto’ (‘I help you, you help me’ in the Maa language) in Kenya’s Kitengela rangeland region, in his presentation said that lack of land tenure and land use policies, increasing demographic pressure, growing rural-to-urban migration, insecurity and lack of a cross-bornder migration framework are some of the key issues to be tackled soon if pastoralism is to survive into the future. Lessons from southern Kenya indicate that trends in land fragmentation and radical policies on land use have been difficult to change. Going by the going rates and direction, pastoralism is headed for harder times in the future. Nkedianye also said the following: ‘Lands in Kajiado are being privatized and fragmented much faster than those in Narok, with huge land speculation going on. . . . In Kajiado in the great drought of 2008/9, only herders able to move to the wetter north were able to save some of their stock. . . .

‘The irony is that as we open up more and more rangelands by providing roads and other basic infrastructure, more people will move in, which will reduce pastoral mobility even more. . . . We need to be consistent and relentless in our policy messages and to promote our women and our adolescents. Two things that are making a big difference in my part of Kenyan Maasailand [Kajiado] are education and Christianity. . . . Pastoralists have “exited” pastoral livelihoods since time immemorial but the present inability of many herders who have lost their animals to go back into pastoral ways of life once they have rebuilt their herds is perhaps new. . . . We have to come to terms with longer term pressures, particularly demographic. . . . Cell phones have changed pastoralism a lot. But more important are that rich people have richer connections.’

Terry McCabe, of the University of Colorado, reminded the group that the biggest shock to East Africa’s pastoralists in more than one hundred years was not climate change but disease—specifically the great rinderpest plague of the end of the 19th and beginning of 20th centuries, which killed whole populations of wild and domesticated animals and led to the starvation of many herding communities.’

The Future Agricultures Consortium and the Feinstein International Center at Tufts University jointly organized this conference to assess ongoing change and innovation in Africa’s pastoral areas. Researchers, policymakers, field practitioners and donor representatives at this conference are assessing the present and future challenges to African pastoralism to define new research and policy agendas.

View the presentation of Polly Ericksen

For more information, visit the Future Agricultures Consortium website conference page or blog and revisit this ILRI News blog.

India, Mozambique goat value chain project starts

Posted on February 14, 2011 by Peter Ballantyne

This week, partners in the ‘imGoats’ project meet in India to finalize plans and outcomes for the project.

The project – official title ‘Small ruminant value chains to reduce poverty and increase food security in India and Mozambique’ – is funded by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and is implemented by the International Livestock Research Institute with CARE (Mozambique) and The BAIF Development Research Foundation (India).

The project aims to transform goat production and marketing in dryland India and Mozambique from an ad hoc, risky informal activity to a sound and profitable enterprise and model that taps into a growing market.

Download the project brochure

ON RESILIENCE: Kenya’s rainfed food production vulnerable to more droughts and floods and shorter growing seasons

Posted on December 3, 2010 by Susan MacMillan

Consolata James, a farmer in Western Kenya fighting striga, a ‘witches’ weed infesting her maize crop, will likely face shorter growing days and the arrival of new diseases with rising temperatures due to climate change (photo credit: CGIAR).

A research project on climate change adaptation strategies by smallholder farmers in Kenya, which kicked off in April 2009, has completed its first two reports. Below is a summary of a policy brief based on these reports developed by Mario Herrero, of the the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and other scientists at ILRI and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).

Main findings
Like many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Kenya is highly vulnerable to climate change. The country and greater region already experience high temperatures and low but variable rainfall. Adoption of modern technology is low; poverty remains widespread; and infrastructure is under-developed.

Kenya’s highly variable rainfall is unreliable for rainfed agriculture and livestock production. The rainy seasons can be extremely wet, bringing floods and inundation. Even arid lands that comprise 80 per cent of the country are prone to floods. Therefore, they are prone to flood damages and turn to insurance claims. Visit the site to know more about LMR Public Adjusters and how they can help.

Kenya also experiences major droughts every decade and minor ones every three to four years. The damage caused by these droughts is spreading among the increasingly dense populations in these fragile arid and semi-arid lands, where pastoral communities are increasingly being marginalized.

With agriculture accounting for about 26 per cent of Kenya’s gross domestic product and 75 per cent of its jobs, the Kenyan economy is highly sensitive to variations in rainfall. At the same time, rainfed agriculture is, and will remain, the dominant source of staple food production and the foundation of livelihoods of most of Kenya’s rural poor.

Many parts of Kenya are likely to experience shorter growing periods in future; in some areas, the decreases may be severe. Some of the largest losses and gains are predicted for the country’s arid areas, which have too few growing days for crop production but remain important for pastoralists.

Most climate change scenarios show that four key staple crops in Kenya—maize, wheat, groundnuts, and irrigated rice—will experience country-wide losses due to increased evapotranspiration in large cropland areas while maize and bean production will increase modestly in the Kenyan highlands.

An increase in climate variability, leading to more than one drought every five years, could cause large and irreversible livestock losses in Kenya’s drylands.

Read the whole ILRI-IFPRI policy brief for a Kenyan Smallholder Climate Change Adaptation Project: Climate variability and climate change: Impacts on Kenyan agriculture, October 2010.

East and central African countries meet in Addis to address climate change regionally

Posted on June 7, 2010 by Susan MacMillan

The Association for Strengthening Agricultural Research in Eastern and Central Africa (ASARECA) is holding a conference—Climate Change Adaptation Strategies, Capacity Building and Agricultural Innovations to Improve Livelihoods in Eastern and Central Africa: Post-Copenhagen—in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 7–9 June 2010.

Joining ASARECA for this 3-day sub-regional meeting are representatives from the Ethiopian Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development; the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research; the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), which has a principal campus in Addis Ababa; the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), based in Syria; and other regional and international partners.

Participants of the ten countries that are members of ASARECA are being presented with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and implications for African countries of the resolutions of last December's climate conference in Copenhagen. The participants will assess the relative vulnerability to climate change of its ten member countries, as well as the impacts expected from climate change and the national agricultural adaptation strategies developed in those countries.

The agricultural innovations and technologies already available for responding to climate change and variability will be assessed for their ability to improve livelihoods in the region's arid and semi-arid areas. The participants will recommend optimal ways to negotiate and facilitate implementation of international climate change agreements in the region as well as ways simultaneously to reduce the impacts of climate change and climate variability while improving livelihoods of dryland peoples, who are particularly vulnerable to a warming planet.

Livestock research in a new ‘framework’ for agricultural development

Posted on April 18, 2010 by Susan MacMillan

The following are highlights of a presentation made by Carlos Seré to open the annual program meeting of the International Livestock Research Institute in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on 15 April 2010.

The reform process of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) is moving full speed ahead. Yesterday, the board of trustees of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) agreed that we join the new CGIAR Consortium.

How do we fold ILRI’s core competencies into the more integrative programs the new CGIAR is developing?

The food price crisis triggered a reconsideration of the importance of international agricultural research. We made a serious mistake in decreasing investments in this area over the last two decades, and it is clear that we are paying the price for that mistake now. There is now renewed interest in agriculture, with many different funds being set up to support it. At the recently concluded Global Consultation on Agricultural Research for Development, in Montpellier, France, there was public recognition that the research and development system has been operating in a fractured way.

Those of us doing international agricultural research have been doing our thing, the national agricultural research systems of developing countries have been doing their thing, and so on. And even if these research organizations had been working effectively together, they have not matched themselves to programs in complementary sectors—in roads and other kinds of infrastructure, in markets, in extension services. Our challenge now is to see how all these investments can be better aligned. Our effort in the CGIAR to establish a Consortium is one part of that overall requirement for much clearer and explicit alignment of the different parts of the development process.

Why should livestock be part of the new CGIAR?

We know that livestock research can explicitly address poverty. ILRI’s research paradigm makes use of a ‘systems perspective’. And, understanding that technical solutions are only part of what poor communities and countries need, ILRI researchers have developed an ‘innovations systems mindset’.

What does ILRI bring to the new CGIAR?

Some examples in the area of 7 global issues that ILRI research addresses.

SUSTAINABLE INTENSIFICATION OF AGRICULTURAL SYSTEMS: more efficient and integrated mixed crop-and-livestock farming systems through development of improved dual-purpose food-feed crops and judicious use of available biomass.
REDUCING PASTORAL VULNERABILITY: livestock vaccines, drought insurance for herders living in drylands, policies that encourage pastoral households to diversify their income sources.
ADAPTATION AND MITIGATION STRATEGIES FOR CLIMATE CHANGE: livestock feeding regimens that increase milk yields while reducing the amounts of greenhouse gases produced; investigation of the levels of carbon sequestration in rangelands.
ENHANCED FOOD SAFEY AND MARKET ACCESS: pro-poor regulations, policies and incentives, particularly for smallholder dairy systems in East Africa and South Asia.
PREVENTION OR CONTROL OF EMERGING ZOONOTIC DISEASES: risk maps, better control of livestock disease outbreaks through participatory epidemiology.
DEVELOPMENT OF LIVESTOCK VACCINES: improved existing vaccines and development of new ones and innovative public-private vehicles for delivering them to poor livestock keepers.
7 CONSERVATION AND USE OF ANIMAL GENETIC RESOURCES: evidence to support conservation priority setting, development of reproductive technologies and other methodologies for better conservation and use of native stock in poor countries.

What are our challenges? How do we integrate all this intelligently into the new CGIAR Consortium and its Mega Programs? How do we implement gender issues into all our research work? How do we build greater capacity in our national and regional partners in developing countries? How do we build the trust needed to make the new and deeper partnerships required by the new way of operating in the new CGIAR? And how do we do a better job of quickly distilling the knowledge from our research to address urgent global issues such as climate change and emerging diseases?

View the presentation:

The State of ILRI

View more presentations from ILRI CGIAR.

New study warns that climate change could create agricultural winners and losers in East Africa

Posted on November 4, 2009 by ILRIComms

While predicting highly variable impacts on agriculture by 2050, experts show that with adequate investment the region can still achieve food security for all

As African leaders prepare to present an ambitious proposal to industrialized countries for coping with climate change in the part of the world that is most vulnerable to its impacts, a new study points to where and how some of this money should be spent. Published in the peer-reviewed journal Agricultural Systems, the study projects that climate change will have highly variable impacts on East Africa’s vital maize and bean harvests over the next two to four decades, presenting growers and livestock keepers with both threats and opportunities.

Previous estimates by the study’s authors projected moderate declines in the production of staple foods by 2050 for the region as a whole but also suggested that the overall picture disguises large differences within and between countries. The new findings provide a more detailed picture than before of variable climate change impacts in East Africa, assessing them according to broadly defined agricultural areas.

‘Even though these types of projections involve much uncertainty, they leave no room for complacency about East Africa’s food security in the coming decades,’ said the lead author of the new study, Philip Thornton of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), which is supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). ‘Countries need to act boldly if they’re to seize opportunities for intensified farming in favored locations, while cushioning the blow that will fall on rural people in more vulnerable areas.’

The researchers simulated likely shifts in cropping, using a combination of two climate change models and two scenarios for greenhouse gas emissions, together with state-of-the-art models for maize and beans, two of the region’s primary staple foods.

In the mixed crop-livestock systems of the tropical highlands, the study shows that rising temperatures may actually favor food crops, helping boost output of maize by about half in highland ‘breadbasket’ areas of Kenya and beans to much the same degree in similar parts of Tanzania. Meanwhile, harvests of maize and beans could decrease in some of the more humid areas, under the climate scenarios used in the study. Across the entire region, production of both crops is projected to decline significantly in drylands, particularly in Tanzania.

‘The emerging scenario of climate-change winners and losers is not inevitable,’ said ILRI director general Carlos Seré. ‘Despite an expected three-fold increase in food demand by 2050, East Africa can still deliver food security for all through a smart approach that carefully matches policies and technologies to the needs and opportunities of particular farming areas.’

At the Seventh World Forum on Sustainable Development, held recently in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, African leaders announced a plan to ask the industrialized world to pay developing countries USD67 billion a year as part of the continent’s common negotiating position for December’s climate talks in Copenhagen.

The ILRI study analyzes various means by which governments and rural households can respond to climate change impacts at different locations. In Kenya, for example, the authors suggest that shifting bean production more to the cooler highland areas might offset some of the losses expected in other systems.

Similarly, Tanzania and Uganda could compensate for projected deficits in both maize and beans through increased regional trade. In the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), maize trade is already worth more than USD1 billion, but only 10 percent of it occurs within the region. As grain prices continue to rise in global markets, several East African countries will be well positioned to expand output of maize and beans for regional markets, thus reducing reliance on imports and boosting rural incomes.

Where crop yields are expected to decline only moderately because of climate change, past experience suggests that rural households can respond effectively by adopting new technologies to intensify crop and livestock production, many of which are being developed by various CGIAR-supported centres and their national partners.

Drought-tolerant maize varieties, for example, have the potential to generate benefits for farmers estimated at USD863 million or more in 13 African countries over the next 6 years, according to a new study carried out by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA). Meanwhile, new heat-tolerant varieties of productive climbing beans, which are traditionally grown in highlands, are permitting their adoption at lower elevations, where they yield more than twice as much grain as the bush-type beans grown currently, according to Robin Buruchara of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT).

In areas that face drastic reductions in maize and bean yields, farmers may need to resort to more radical options, such as changing the types of crops they grow (replacing maize, for example, with sorghum or millet), keeping more livestock or abandoning crops altogether to embrace new alternatives, such as the provision of environmental services, including carbon sequestration.

This latter option could become a reality under COMESA’s Africa Biocarbon Initiative, which is designed to tap the huge potential of the region’s diverse farmlands and other rural landscapes, ranging from dry grasslands to humid tropical forests, for storing millions of tons of carbon. The initiative offers African negotiators an appealing option in their efforts to influence a future climate change agreement.

‘If included in emissions payment schemes, this initiative could create new sources of income for African farmers and enhance their resilience to climate change,’ said Peter Akong Minang, global coordinator of the Alternatives to Slash-and-Burn (ASB) Programme at the World Agroforestry Centre. ‘Its broad landscape approach would open the door for many African countries to actively participate in, and benefit from, global carbon markets.’

‘Rural people manage their livelihoods and land in an integrated way that encompasses many activities,’ said Bruce Campbell, director of the CGIAR’s Challenge Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security. ‘That’s why they need integrated options to cope with climate change, consisting of diverse innovations, such as drought-tolerant crops, better management of livestock, provision of environmental services and so forth.’

How rapidly and successfully East African nations and rural households can take advantage of such measures will depend on aggressive new investments in agriculture, CGIAR researchers argue. According to a recent study by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), it will take about USD7 billion annually, invested mainly in rural roads, better water management and increased agricultural research, to avert the dire implications of climate change for child nutrition worldwide.

About 40 per cent of that investment would address the needs of sub-Saharan Africa, where modest reductions projected for maize yields in the region as a whole are expected to translate into a dramatic rise in the number of malnourished children by 2050. Thornton’s projections probably underestimate the impacts on crop production, because they reflect increasing temperatures and rainfall changes only and not greater variability in the weather and growing pressure from stresses like drought and insect pests.

‘Farmers and pastoralists in East Africa have a long history of dealing with the vagaries of the weather,’ said Seré. ‘But climate change will stretch their adaptive capacity beyond its limits, as recent severe drought in the region has made abundantly clear. Let’s not leave rural people to fend for themselves but rather invest significantly in helping them build a more viable future.’

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About ILRI:
The Africa-based International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) works at the crossroads of livestock and poverty, bringing high-quality science and capacity-building to bear on poverty reduction and sustainable development. ILRI is one of 15 centers supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). It has its headquarters in Kenya and a principal campus in Ethiopia. It also has teams working out of offices in Nigeria, Mali, Mozambique, India, Thailand, Indonesia, Laos, Vietnam and China. www.ilri.org.

About the CGIAR: The CGIAR, established in 1971, is a strategic partnership of countries, international and regional organizations and private foundations supporting the work of 15 international Centers. In collaboration with national agricultural research systems, civil society and the private sector, the CGIAR fosters sustainable agricultural growth through high-quality science aimed at benefiting the poor through stronger food security, better human nutrition and health, higher incomes and improved management of natural resources. www.cgiar.org

Drought hits Kenya’s livestock herders hard

Posted on October 5, 2009 by ILRIComms

Drought hits Kenya’s livestock herders hard, forcing some communities out of self-reliant pastoral ways of life (photo credit: ILRI/Mann).

Stories of the two-year drought biting deep in pastoral lands in the Horn of Africa are heartbreaking. Kenya’s livestock herders are being hit particularly hard. More than three-quarters of Kenya comprises arid and semi-arid lands too dry for growing crops of any kind. Only pastoral tribes, able to eke out a living by raising livestock on common grasslands, can make a living for themselves and their families here, where rainfall is destiny. With changes in the climate bringing droughts every few years in this region of eastern Africa, some doubt that traditional pastoral ways of life, evolved in this region over some 12,000 years, can long survive. Climate change here is not an academic discussion but rather a matter of life and death. But pastoral knowledge of how to survive harsh climates—largely by moving animals to take advantage of common lands where the grass is growing—is needed now more than ever.

This is especially true in Africa, whose many vast drylands are expected to suffer greater extremes in climate in future. Two of the recent reports are from America’s Public Radio International (‘Drought in East Africa’: <http://www.pri.org/business/nonprofits/drought-east-africa1629.html>) and the UK’s Guardian newspaper (‘The last nomads: Drought drives Kenya’s herders to the brink’: <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/13/drought-kenya-nomads>). The Guardian article tells a heart-breaking story about “pastoral dropouts”, a story that may mark “not simply the end . . . of generations of nomadic existence in the isolated lands where Kenya meets Somalia and Ethiopia, but the imminent collapse of a whole way of life that has been destroyed by an unprecedented decade of successive droughts”.

The article says this region has experienced three serious droughts in the last decade, when formerly a drought occurred every 9 to 12 years. This change in global weather patterns ‘has been whittling away at the nomads’ capacity to restock with animals—to replenish and survive—normally a period of about three years”. The Economist in its 19 September 2009 edition says global warming is creating a ‘bad climate for development’ (<http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14447171>). The article says that poor countries’ economic development will contribute to climate change—but they are already its victims. ‘Most people in the West know that the poor world contributes to climate change, though the scale of its contribution still comes as a surprise. Poor and middle-income countries already account for just over half of total carbon emissions (see chart 1); Brazil produces more CO2 per head than Germany. The lifetime emissions from these countries’ planned power stations would match the world’s entire industrial pollution since 1850.

‘Less often realised, though, is that global warming does far more damage to poor countries than they do to the climate. In a report in 2006 Nicholas (now Lord) Stern calculated that a 2°C rise in global temperature cost about 1% of world GDP. But the World Bank, in its new World Development Report <http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14447171#footnote1> , now says the cost to Africa will be more like 4% of GDP and to India, 5%. Even if environmental costs were distributed equally to every person on earth, developing countries would still bear 80% of the burden (because they account for 80% of world population). As it is, they bear an even greater share, though their citizens’ carbon footprints are much smaller . . . . ‘The poor are more vulnerable than the rich for several reasons. Flimsy housing, poor health and inadequate health care mean that natural disasters of all kinds hurt them more. ‘The biggest vulnerability is that the weather gravely affects developing countries’ main economic activities—such as farming and tourism. Global warming dries out farmland. Since two-thirds of Africa is desert or arid, the continent is heavily exposed. One study predicts that by 2080 as much as a fifth of Africa’s farmland will be severely stressed.’

The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and its local and international partners are working to help pastoral communities in this region increase their resilience in the face of the current drought, as well as population growth, climate change, and other big changes affecting pastoral ways of life.

Scientists are helping Maasai communities in the Kitengela rangelands of Kenya (outside Nairobi) obtain and use evidence that new schemes to pay herders small sums of money per hectare to keep their lands unfenced are working for the benefit of livestock and wildlife movements alike.
Scientists are helping Maasai communities in the rangelands surrounding Kenya’s famous Masai Mara National Reserve to obtain and use evidence that public-private partnerships now building new wildlife conservancies that pay pastoralists to leave some of their lands for wildlife rather than livestock grazing are win-win options for conservationists and pastoral communities alike.
Scientists have refined and mass produced a vaccine against the lethal cattle disease East Coast fever—and are helping public-private partnerships to regulate and distribute the vaccine in 11 countries of eastern, central and southern Africa where the disease is endemic—so that pastoral herders can save some of their famished livestock in this drought from attack by disease, and use those animals to rebuild their herds when the drought is over.
Scientists are characterizing and helping to conserve the indigenous livestock breeds that Africa’s pastoralists have kept for millennia—breeds that have evolved special hardiness to cope with harsh conditions such as droughts and diseases—so that these genetic traits can be more widely used to cope with the changing climate.

But much more needs to be done. And it needs to be done much more closely with the livestock herding communities that have so much to teach us about how to cope with a changing and variable climate.

New dual-purpose sorghum: Food for people and livestock

Posted on December 18, 2008 by ILRIComms

New varieties of food-feed sorghum are meeting the basic needs of India?s 208 million crop-livestock farmers, as well as feeding its growing human population.

Throughout the tropics, farm animals are kept underweight and underproductive due to lack of feed. This constraint is stopping some 600 million poor farmers from meeting a fast-rising global demand for milk and meat. But a new partnership, developing dual-purpose food-feed sorghum varieties is helping to meet the basic needs of India’s farmers and leading to similar work in other crops and other countries.

The single most important ruminant feed resource on many of the small crop-livestock farms of Asia and Africa is not grass but rather the stalks, leaves and other remains of crop plants after harvesting. In India, for example, 44% of the feed annually sustaining all the country’s cattle, buffalo, goats, sheep and camel populations is made up of such crop ‘wastes’. The rest comes from planted forages and a shrinking area of pastures and other common lands. Expensive concentrates—the mainstay of livestock production in rich countries—are used only very occasionally.

While crop residues (straw and stover) have become a main feed for farm animals of the South, crop breeders until recently continued to focus solely on increasing grain yields. But a research partnership between India’s National Research centre for Sorghum (NRCS), the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) and ILRI is redressing this oversight in India’s all-important sorghum crop, grown on nearly 10,000,000 hectares on the country. The research partners incorporated fodder quality traits in India’s crop breeding trials and in doing so, led breeders to identify sorghum varieties with high yields of both grain and stover as well as improved stover quality.

Partners in the sorghum food-feed collaboration

India’s National Research Centre for Sorghum (NRCS) leads the All-India Coordinated Sorghum Improvement Program mandated to test and release new cultivars. It also assesses the socio-economic importance of sorghum-based livelihoods.
Website: http://www.nrcsorghum.res.in

The International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) provided conventional and molecular sorghum breeding, global crop economics and assessments of the impacts of crop interventions for the poor.
Website: http://www.icrisat.org

The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) conducted the livestock nutrition work and provided expertise in global livestock economics and assessments of the impacts of livestock interventions for the poor.
Website: http://www.ilri.org

Summary of results from the sorghum trials
The research partnership began in 1999 by assessing the potential impacts on India’s smallholder livestock productivity of planting sorghum and millet varieties with genetically enhanced stover fodder quality and quantity. Remarkably, results indicated that a 1% increase in just one livestock productivity-related parameter—stover digestibility—would result in increases in milk, meat and draught power outputs ranging from 6-8%. The net present value of the research was estimated to range from US$42-208 million, with predicted high rates of return to the research investment of 28-43% and corresponding high benefit:cost ratios of 15 to 69:1.

ILRI then proceeded to establish facilities for animal nutrition studies using large and small ruminants at ICRISAT’s Patancheru headquarters, close to the NRCS. These facilities enabled the research partners to make a stepwise evaluation of the relationships between fodder from different sorghum lines and livestock productivity—and to find a simple way of assessing these. Animal experimentation, while itself impractical as a routine screening tool, quickly laid a sound basis for developing and validating simple laboratory assessment methods and for quantifying potential impacts on livestock productivity.

In 2001 work began with combined feeding and laboratory trials of stover obtained from a wide range of sorghum varieties and hybrids. The trials simulated diverse on-farm circumstances, including those where stover is scarce, abundant and supplemented with other forages, because fodder qualities depend on a farm’s total feed resources. Across India’s great drylands, for example, where insufficient feed prevents animals from eating until they have satisfied their appetites, a fodder trait for ‘voluntary feed intake potential’ is likely to be irrelevant while another for ‘feed digestibility’ is critically important.

Sorghum varieties were investigated for their morphological characteristics and structure (leaf blade:leaf sheath:stem proportions, plant height, stem diameter, residual green leaf area), chemical constituents (protein, fiber, sugar) in the stover and in vitro fermentation characteristics (true and apparent digestibility, rate of fermentation, partitioning of fermentation products). Results showed that fodder quality traits measured in the laboratory could be used to predict and account for at least 80% of the variation in relevant livestock productivity traits, such as digestible organic matter intake and nitrogen balance.

Traits were chosen also for the ease with which they could be measured (e.g. plant height, stem diameter) and/or be accurately predicted by near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). Importantly, use of NIRS technology allowed all the partners in the project, including those with no livestock feeding facilities, easy access to developed and validated NIRS prediction equations and consequently phenotyping for stover fodder quality capability. NRCS staff seconded to ILRI’s livestock nutritional facilities on ICRISAT’s Patancheru campus used the facilities and NIRS equations to comprehensively assess all newly submitted sorghum cultivars.

Breaking new ground in food-feed crops
Identification of superior dual-purpose food-plus-feed sorghum varieties is now helping India close its livestock feed gap as well as feed its growing human population. By increasing the country’s livestock productivity, this research is improving the livelihoods of some 100 million mixed crop-livestock farmers —and doing so in ways those small farmers should be able to sustain over the longer term. This partnership also led the way for similar work on millet, groundnut, rice, maize and cowpea and new collaborations are about to begin on wheat and various leguminous crops.

By generating superior dual-purpose sorghum varieties suited to India’s millions of smallholder farmers, this collaborative research has been path-breaking in demonstrating that traits for stover fodder quality and quantity can be incorporated into existing breeding programs to improve grain yields—and with minimum investments in equipment, staff and labour and minimum transaction costs for the collaborating institutions.

It further offers a practical two-step approach to development of food-feed crops. First, exploit dual-purpose traits in existing cultivars by complementing traditional crop improvement programs with information about the quantity and quality of expected yields of crop residues for livestock feed. Second, target dual-purpose crops for genetic enhancement. The first approach, comparatively cheap and logistically feasible, promises quick benefits for resource-poor farmers. The second, more strategic, approach requires more investments and benefits farmers later and over the longer term. In a world of scarce and rapidly diminishing land, water, fodder and other natural resources, both approaches merit the world’s attention.

ILRI Top story 22 August 2007
Sweet sorghum: utilizing every 'drop'

Contacts
For further information about this project contact:
Michael Blummel
ILRI c/o ICRISAT
Patancheru 502 234AP India
Email: m.blummel@cgiar.org

For further information about ILRI’s activities in Asia contact:

Iain Wright
ILRI’s regional representative in Asia
Email: i.wright@cgiar.org

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