This year’s Yara Prize honours hard-hitting and long-term policy advocacy by ILRI board chair Lindiwe Majele Sibanda

Posted on September 5, 2013 by Susan MacMillan

Co-winners of the Yara Prize for 2013, announced last night (4 Sep 2013) are Nigerian Nnaemeka Ikegwuonu (left) and Zimbabwean Lindiwe Majele Sibanda, chair of ILRI’s board of trustees (picture credit: Bella Naija).

The Yara Prize 2013 was yesterday awarded to Nnaemeka Ikegwuonu, founder and CEO of the Smallholders Foundation in Nigeria, and Lindiwe Majele Sibanda, CEO of the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN) and chair of the board of trustees of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI).

The Yara Prize Committee selected two prominent African laureates for their work for African farmers and for the continent’s green revolution. The award recognizes their effective entrepreneurial work which has spread knowledge that has inspired smallholder farmers and youth to improve their lives, and their policy dialogue and advocacy which has enabled change in the African agricultural sector.

Both laureates have, through personal commitment and special efforts, translated ideas on the development of African agriculture into real results. They are both examples of the can-do spirit and drive that is playing a vital role in transforming agriculture in Africa.

The two laureates were celebrated during a Yara Prize Ceremony in Maputo, Mozambique, held yesterday, 4 Sep 2013, in connection with the Africa Green Revolution Forum (AGRF) 2013.

Nnaemeka Ikegwuonu’s award—communicating for impact
Ikegwuonu was being awarded the prize for his entrepreneurial work of using radio as transmitter of sustainable agricultural development and environmental conservation beneficial to rural poor small farmers in the Imo State in southeast Nigeria. Ikegwuonu and the Smallholders Foundation develops and broadcasts 10 hours of educational radio programs daily to 250,000 listeners. The radio programs are held in the local Igbo language. Since 2007, 65 percent of his radio program listeners have increased their agricultural yield by 50 percent and their household income by 45 percent.

Lindiwe Majele Sibanda’s award—advocating for impact

ILRI director general Jimmy Smith and ILRI board chair Lindiwe Majele Sibanda at the 6th Africa Agriculture Science Week (AASW6), in Accra, Ghana, 15-20 Jul 2013, organized by the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA) (photo credit: ILRI/Paul Karaimu).

Lindiwe Majele Sibanda was awarded the prize for her many years of work generating knowledge and facilitating dialogue to develop informed, research-based development through policy and advocacy across Africa as CEO of the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN), where she has served since 2004.

FANRPAN is perceived to be one of the most influential policy networks across the African region. Its focus areas include policy research and advocacy work on food policy, agricultural productivity, natural resources and environment, and the impact of HIV/AIDS on farmers livelihoods. Sibanda, who is an animal scientist by training as well as a beef farmer herself, has played a global leadership role in increasing the visibility and importance of agriculture as a key development driver. In 2009, Sibanda led the global ‘No-Agriculture, No-Deal’ campaign and mobilized African civil society organizations to push for the inclusion of agriculture in negotiations of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Sibanda has built the advocacy capacity of FANRPAN through her innovative use of strategic outreach and communication activities, which help leverage and amplify the work done by the organization and its partners at the ground level. In this way, Sibanda has effectively made FANRPAN one of the most recognized and trusted voices on African agriculture and food security, with a strong focus on the continent’s women and young farmers. (Understanding the need to nurture Africa’s youth and include them in agricultural policy processes, FANRPAN launched the FANRPAN Youth in Agriculture Award in 2012.)

Siboniso (‘Boni’) Moyo, another distinguished Zimbabwean animal scientist cum beef farmer, who serves ILRI as its representative for southern Africa, attended the award ceremony in Maputo and was on hand to personally congratulate her country-woman on Sibanda’s achievement. All the directors and staff are delighted to congratulate Lindiwe Majele Sibanda, as well as Nnaemeka Ikegwuonu and both their tireless organizations, for this prestigious award, which is so well deserved and does so much to honour what is right and exciting about Africa and African leadership.

Read a profile of Sibanda.

View a short filmed interview of Sibanda at the July 2013 Accra meeting of the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa.

View a short animated film, Cultivate the future! How learning together can mean learning better and faster, speeding research into use’, co-developed and narrated by Sibanda.

About the Yara Prize
The Yara Prize for an African Green Revolution seeks to contribute to the transformation of African agriculture and food availability, within a sustainable context, thereby helping to reduce hunger and poverty. The Yara Prize is based on nominations of candidates who are carefully evaluated by the Yara Prize Committee. The Yara Prize consists of USD60,000, which will be split between the laureates, a crystal trophy and a diploma. The Yara Prize was handed out in Oslo from 2005 to 2009. In 2012, it moved to Africa, where it was handed out as part of AGRF 2012 in Arusha, Tanzania. The Yara Prize 2013 was awarded during a ceremony in Maputo, Mozambique, on Wed 4 Sep 2013.

Empower local experts to inform agricultural policy in Africa: Short filmed interview of FANRPAN’s Lindiwe Majele Sibanda

Posted on July 30, 2013 by Paul Karaimu

One of the more interesting side events at this month’s sixth Africa Agriculture Science Week (AASW6) hosted by the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA) in Accra, Ghana, 15–20 Jul 2013, was hosted by the CGIAR Challenge Program on Water & Food, of which the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) is a partner.

In this 2.48-minute filmed interview at AASW6, Lindiwe Majele Sibanda, chief executive officer and chief of mission of the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN), based in South Africa, shares how ‘innovation platforms’ have ‘brought a new way of doing business’ that is helping to inform policy changes in the agricultural sector.

‘What is clear was that we have often sidelined traditional leaders and not looked at non-scientists and non-technocrats,’ said Sibanda, who chairs ILRI’s board of trustees. ‘We should be focusing on empowering these local experts, giving them capacity to inform policy processes to ensure sustainability.’

‘For this to happen,’ Sibanda says, ‘we need policies that are created bottom up, where the evidence comes from practitioners but is packaged to feed directly into policy.’

‘This process is about equipping all actors to be drivers of change—change that is driven by evidence that comes from research,’ she adds.

The chain starts from those affected by the problem being around the table with those who want to experiment, research and deliver options for development—sitting as equal partners.—Lindiwe Majele Sibanda, CEO of FANRPAN

This session by the CGIAR Challenge Program on Water & Food, which was facilitated by ILRI’s knowledge management and communication specialist, Ewen Le Borgne, shared experiences from the Limpopo, Nile and Volta basins on engaging partners, keeping them motivated and sustaining their engagement after the program is completed. The session’s 70 participants discussed how to set up engagement platforms, engage with policy, scale up platforms and how to deal with power and representation in these groups.

About AASW6
FARA’s 6th Africa Agriculture Science Week (AASW6), in Accra, Ghana, included marketplace exhibitions (15-20 Jul 2013), side events on sub-themes (15-16), a ministerial roundtable alongside a Ghana Day (17 Jul), plenary sessions (18-19) and a FARA Business Meeting (20 Jul). The discussions were captured on Twitter (hashtag #AASW6) and blogged about on the FARA AASW6 blog.

Lindiwe Majele Sibanda and Monty Jones on closing the gaps in agricultural research for Africa’s development

Posted on July 19, 2013 by Susan MacMillan

Note: This post was developed by ILRI corporate communications writer/editor Paul Karaimu.

The second day of the ongoing (15-20 Jul 2013) sixth Africa Agriculture Science Week of the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA), in Accra, Ghana, featured conversations on how to develop climate-smart agriculture, how to improve the resilience as well as productivity of Africa’s smallholder farmers and how to make wider use of demonstrable successes in development of the continent’s capacity for agricultural innovation.

Although small-scale farmers and herders produce most of the continent’s food, many of them remain beyond the reach of agencies providing essential, up-to-date and locally relevant information on optimal crop and animal husbandry practices. Indeed, a significant gap continues to divide researchers of food production from the farmers who produce the food.

Monty Jones, executive director of FARA, speaking at AASW6 (photo credit: ILRI/Paul Karaimu).

And then there are the disabling gaps between research disciplines and fields related to agriculture.

‘Competitiveness is much needed but often neglected in Africa’, says Monty Jones, the executive director of FARA. ‘We need to look at all the elements in our agricultural value chains, including labour productivity, food safety, retail and consumer preferences. These are all needed to enhance our agricultural productivity. Further, we need to integrate research in agriculture with research on climate change and watershed management and other issues that impinge on agricultural productivity.’

Lindiwe Majele Sibanda speaking at Africa Agriculture Science Week (photo credit: ILRI/Paul Karaimu).

Lindiwe Majele Sibanda, a policy expert and beef farmer from Zimbabwe who is chief executive officer and chief of mission of the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN), based in Pretoria, agrees.

‘We need to listen to trusted messengers, including non-technocrats and community leaders’, Sibanda says. ‘Only by integrating these local views and knowledge in our policymaking will we have a chance of making our interventions sustainable.’

Sibabda, who also serves as chair of the board of trustees of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), also recommends a review of national support to research institutions.

Our African institutions remain weak. They’re weak because we have not invested in research. We still little appreciate the central role of research in development. A starting point in turning this round would be a call on our governments to use African money to invest in African research institutions. That will help us produce researchers who can help us meet our development goals.—Lindiwe Sibanda

AASW6
FARA’s 6th Africa Agriculture Science Week (AASW6), in Accra, Ghana, included marketplace exhibitions (15–20 Jul 2013), side events on sub-themes (15–16), a ministerial roundtable alongside a Ghana Day (17 Jul), plenary sessions (18–19) and a FARA Business Meeting (20 Jul). The discussions were captured on Twitter (hashtag #AASW6) and blogged about on the FARA AASW6 blog.

Zimbabwean beef farmer, livestock scientist and agricultural policy thinker assumes chair of ILRI’s Board of Trustees

Posted on December 2, 2012 by Susan MacMillan

Trained animal scientist and practicing commercial beef cattle farmer Lindiwe Sibanda, who for years has been one of the most influential thinkers in agriculture, food security and climate change global policy, has been appointed chair of the ILRI Board of Trustees.

New board chair
The board of trustees of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), at its 38^th meeting in New Delhi, India, in November 2012, appointed Lindiwe Majele Sibanda as board chair.

Lindiwe Sibanda takes over from Knut Hove, who has served on ILRI’s board since 2005 and as board chair since November 2009.

Sibanda has served on the ILRI board since 2009, most recently as chair of the board’s human resources and nominations committees.

Sibanda represents three ‘firsts’ for ILRI: She is ILRI’s first female board chair, ILRI’s first board chair from a developing country and the youngest of all of ILRI’s previous board chairs.

Sibanda has a wealth of experience in research, partnerships and management. Born in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, she received her agricultural training in Egypt, the UK and Zimbabwe, where her doctoral studies focused on the nutritional requirements of lactating goats. Her portfolio includes policy research and advocacy programs on food policies, agricultural productivity and markets, rural livelihoods and climate change.

Since 2004, Sibanda has been CEO and head of mission of the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN), based in South Africa, where she coordinates high-level policy research and advocacy programs aimed at making Africa a food-secure continent.

On her ‘hot topics’, which include poverty, hunger and malnutrition, water scarcity and climate change, Sibanda is a formidable force. Since 2008, Sibanda has been a leading advocate for Farming First—advocating a holistic approach to sustainable agricultural development. In 2009 she led the No Agriculture, No Deal global campaign and mobilized African civil society organizations to push for the inclusion of agriculture in the Copenhagen negotiations of the United Nations Framework for Climate Change Convention. In 2010 she was invited to serve on the Guardian’s Global Development advisory panel. In 2011, she was nominated to serve on the independent science panel of the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security.

Sibanda is as forthright as she is committed. This year, for example, at the 35^th session of the governing council of the International Fund for Agricultural Research (IFAD), following an address by Bill Gates, Sibanda lamented ‘the lack of leadership amidst the African countries who are yet to put farming first, despite the 2004 CAADAP pledge to dedicate 10% of national budgets in Africa towards agriculture’. She also highlighted the ‘disjoint’ between technology and policy: ‘Despite the technologies being available to farmers for soil/animal management and water harvesting, policies are restricting farmers’ ability to use them.’

In an interview with the Global Citizens Initiative, Sibanda said: ‘I believe the world needs to take a 360 degree approach to development; that is, we must look at development not only for economic gain, but also for social gain and environmental gain. In other words we have to feed the fiscus, feed the family, and feed the environment. Without balancing our investment across these three domains, we will reach a tipping point and our growth will not be sustainable. We are currently taking more than we give back. Our goal should be to reap an optimum yield from our development investments not a maximum yield. Sustainability is about more for less.’

With all her passionate advocating and policy work, Sibanda still finds time in her busy schedule to manage her beef cattle farm in Zimbabwe. (Her imposing livestock credentials outstrip most of the rest of ILRI’s staff, management and board!) Find out more by visiting the FANRPAN website.

Two new board members
At the same November 2012 meeting of ILRI’s board of trustees, ILRI board members and management welcomed two new members to ILRI’s board.

Rodney Cooke, British, was until recently director of the Policy and Technical Advisory Division at the International Fund for Agricultural Research (IFAD), based in Rome. Before this (1995–2000), Cooke was director of the Technical Centre for Agriculture and Rural Development, in Wageningen, Netherlands. Before that, he was deputy director of the Natural Resources Institute, in Chatham, UK. Cooke brings a wealth of experience in agriculture and rural development, including aspects such as institutional appraisal, corporate planning and management of change; project identification, implementation, monitoring and evaluation; R&D management and technology transfer and training programs. Trained in biochemistry in the UK and US, Cooke has a breadth of skills in conventional science through to its application in agricultural development. He has worked in Latin America, Africa, India and Southeast Asia. View a recent presentation Cooke made at a Science Symposium hosted by the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics: Smallholder farmers confronting rain-fed agriculture: lessons learnt as we approach the MDGs of 2015.

Suzanne Petersen is also British but based in the USA, where she has been a marketing, brand, business and product manager for Land O’Lakes Purina Feed, leading the company’s marketing of feed for cattle, dairy cows and swine. Trained in physiology and poultry feed research in the UK and Australia, Petersen has considerable experience in the feed sector, including market analysis and strategy development in a private sector context in Switzerland and the United States. She brings a unique blend of private sector, feeds research, business development and marketing skills to ILRI’s board. Find out more about Petersen’s work and company at the Land O’Lakes website: http://www.lolfeed.com/

Improving African food security in the face of climate change

Posted on September 1, 2010 by Paul Karaimu

Scientists, policymakers and farmers from across Africa are meeting this week in Windhoek, Namibia to discuss how to improve food security in Africa in the face of climate change. (Photo credit: ILRI/Stevie Mann)

The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) is this week joining over 200 policymakers, farmers, agricultural product dealers, scientists and non-governmental organizations from across Africa in Windhoek, Namibia, in a week-long Regional Food Security Policy Dialogue organized by the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN). This year’s dialogue focuses on African priorities for food security and climate change and the impacts of climate change on agricultural development, natural resource management and rural livelihoods.

ILRI agricultural systems analyst Mario Herrero and Siboniso Moyo, ILRI representative for southern Africa, are attending this conference, which runs from 30 August to 3 September 2010. The participants are examining ways of helping over 265 million people on the continent overcome chronic hunger.

Lindiwe Sibanda, Chief Executive Officer of the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resource Policy Analysis Network and member of ILRI’s Board of Trustees, says, ‘Africa’s challenges include stagnant agricultural productivity; limited access to agricultural inputs, water, markets and knowledge. And increasingly, we must also cope with more extreme and erratic weather (floods and droughts), soil salinity and unpredictable rainfall, and the effects of such climate change on agricultural production.’

Because agriculture, including livestock farming, still holds the greatest potential to boost rural livelihoods, reduce poverty and spur growth in other sectors in the continent, forums such as this are needed to pull together high-quality, evidenced-based, information and knowledge that can benefit Africa’s poorest people, most of whom are women who rely on agriculture for their livelihoods.

With 60 percent of the world's uncultivated arable land, Africa's agricultural sector has potential to feed its own people and grow to a US$880 billion industry if the right production strategies and methods are used to increase production.

‘To achieve this’, said Sibanda, ‘agricultural tools and knowledge must be made accessible to farmers to increase their yields and adapt to new climate scenarios. Africa needs its own agricultural revolution, one built on technology and innovation and facilitated by a conducive policy environment aligned with the needs of African farmers.’

The Food, Agriculture and Natural Resource Policy Analysis Network works in 13 African countries, encouraging government and civil society to work together in support of demand-driven agricultural policy research and analysis.

For more coverage of the 2010 dialogue, visit:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/katine/katine-chronicles-blog/2010/aug/24/africa-katine-farming and http://www.alertnet.org/db/blogs/66102/2010/07/26-152915-1.htm

To find out more about ILRI's presentation during the meeting (by Mario Herrero) please visit: http://www.slideshare.net/ILRI/fanrpan-policy-meetings-sept-2010 and http://africa.ipsterraviva.net/2010/09/01/agriculture-in-africa-is-changing-rapidly/.

For information about the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resource Policy Analysis Network, see http://www.fanrpan.org/

Looking to a bright future for livestock research

Posted on April 16, 2010 by ILRIComms

Lindiwe Majele Sibanda joined the Board of Trustees of ILRI (International Livestock Research Institute) in 2009. She has just attended her second meeting, held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. ‘By the time I arrived in 2009, it was clear that ILRI would be part of a new Consortium of International Agricultural Research Centers, and this was a particularly exciting time to join the board,’ she says. The agreement to join the new Consortium was formally signed this week in Addis Ababa. ‘The Consortium is effectively saying: we are a family with 15 children with different expertise, but we want you to answer to one surname, and the new surname is Poverty Reduction.’ In the past, she says, the centres tended to work in ‘silos’, building their own empires and strengthening the walls between them. Those days are now over.

Sibanda brings a range of skills to ILRI. Born in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, she received her agricultural training in Egypt, the UK and Zimbabwe, where her PhD studies focused on the nutritional requirements of lactating goats. She was known by villagers as ‘the woman who wears gumboots and overalls.’ Since 2004, she has been chief executive officer of the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN), based in South Africa, and she still makes regular visits to her beef farm in Zimbabwe.

‘One of the reasons I was keen to join ILRI was because I'd been sceptical about the CGIAR and its contribution to development in the South,’ she says. ‘At FANRPAN, we found it hard to see how research outputs from centers like ILRI informed policy, and we lacked the sort of evidence we needed in our dialogue with government and others.’

As a member of the board, Sibanda hopes she can take the research outputs and messages from ILRI to the wider world, making them relevant and useful to governments, NGOs, the private sector and to the key beneficiaries, the world's poor livestock farmers. ‘Among other things, I will advocate for more resources,’ she says. Over the past 30 years or so, funds for agricultural research have declined. "That's partly because we haven't had enough ammunition, in the shape of good qualitative evidence about the importance of livestock, to counter the decline."

It is time to buck the trend, she says, but that will only happen if research organizations communicate their findings effectively to the outside world. ‘In this new era, I believe we have to invest heavily in communications, and make it clear that scientific research must be properly funded if we are to create a food-secure world where we don't have 1 billion people going to bed hungry every night.’

ILRI news

Better lives through livestock

Tag Archives: FANRPAN