The project Livestock and irrigation value chains for Ethiopian smallholders (LIVES) is an initiative designed by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) and their national partners to build upon the success of the Canadian International Development Agency-funded project, Improving Productivity and Market Success of Smallholders in Ethiopia (IPMS).
Since 2005, IPMS has helped to create in its pilot areas an enabling environment in which the public sector, smallholder farmers and private-sector agents are empowered to increase the production and productivity of crops and livestock through participatory, market-oriented development. The successes resulted from applying innovation systems approaches to identify and exploit opportunities in commodity value chains.
LIVES will not only build on these lessons but also introduce new approaches and interventions, and will scale up and out, focusing on a more limited number of value chains, and emphasizing the development of sustained capacity that will continue to have impact beyond the life of the project.
Goal
To contribute to enhanced income and gender equitable wealth creation for smallholders and other value chain actors through increased and sustained market offtake of high-value livestock and irrigated crop commodities.
Purpose
To improve competitiveness, sustainability and equity in value chains for selected high-value livestock and irrigated crop commodities in target areas of four regions of Ethiopia.
Objectives
Funding: Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA)
Millions of small-scale farmers efficiently supply the great majority of the meat, milk and fish market in Africa. Surging demand for livestock products and changing consumer demands (the ‘Livestock Revolution’) provide an opportunity to set poor farmers on pathways out of poverty, but also threaten the continued presence of smallholder farmers in increasingly demanding markets.
While the presence of food safety hazards (such as microbial pathogens and residues) in informally-marketed food is high, the risk to human health is mostly unknown and current food safety management is both ineffective and inequitable. Risk-based approaches for assessing and managing food safety offer a powerful new method for reducing the enormous health burden imposed by food-borne disease, while taking into account other societal goals such as pro-poor agri-food sector development and food and nutritional security.
The ultimate goal of this second phase of the Safe Food, Fair Food project (Safe Food, Fair Food 2) is the improvement of livelihoods of poor producers and consumers by reducing the health risks and increasing the livelihood benefits associated with meat, milk and fish value chains.
Its purpose is furthering research into the practical application of risk analysis and economic and social methods by food safety stakeholders and value chain actors, improving food safety and market participation of the poor in informal markets for livestock products in sub-Saharan Africa.
The project contributes to this with outputs at two scales:
The project will work in four countries (Ethiopia, Mali, Tanzania and Uganda) and with university and research networks and economic communities in East, West and southern Africa. It will build directly on previous work supported by the BMZ-funded Safe Food, Fair Food project that increased capacity and generated evidence for improving food safety in eight African countries, training over 50 food safety stakeholders and supporting 20 post-graduate research projects.
Funding: Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development
Project coordinator: Kristina Roesel
The aim of this project is to enable improved planning of agricultural development in upland watersheds in the southern Philippines such that agricultural production can be increased and watersheds can be protected – precursors to reducing rural poverty and improving livelihoods.
This aim will be achieved through the following objectives:
1. Develop and apply efficient methods to characterise the Cabulig (Misamis Oriental), Inabanga (Bohol) and Billabong watersheds (NSW) to include biophysical and socio-economic information, with particular emphasis on mapping land and soil attributes using digital technology.
2. Develop improved approaches to analysing the suitability of sloping land for agricultural intensification within a watershed context.
3. Inform and enhance local land use planning processes at both the watershed and community scales in Cabulig and Inabanga watersheds.
4. Design and implement on-going monitoring programs in the Philippine watersheds that allows critical assessment of the adoption and impacts of land use planning.
