During the lifetime of the Fodder Adoption Project ILRI established local innovation platforms at various field sites around Ethiopia. The idea behind these was to provide a forum for key livestock feed stakeholders to get together and jointly plan actions to improve the livestock feed situation for smallholder farmers. One such innovation platform was established … Continue reading
Under the title ‘Enhancing Livelihoods of Poor Livestock Keepers through Increased Use of Fodder’, the goal of this IFAD-funded Programme was to improve the livelihoods of poor livestock keepers in Ethiopia, Syria and Vietnam in a sustainable manner through increased access to and adoption of fodder interventions. With activities in Ethiopia, Syria and Vietnam and … Continue reading
On September 28, I joined Andre Van Rooyen (ICRISAT) and Ranjitha Puskur (ILRI) in a session on innovation platforms in agricultural research for development at the Rome AgriKnowledge share fair. For my presentation, I used experiences of the ‘Fodder Adoption Project in Ethiopia to illustrate how using the innovation systems approach shifted the focus of … Continue reading
We have been introducing a series of Technical Advisory Notes arising from the IFAD-funded Fodder Adoption Project on this blog. The last of these describes implementation of the project in Syria. Dr Asamoah Larbi (ex of the International Centre for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas; ICARDA) writes: “Feed scarcity prevents small-scale sheep and goat … Continue reading
Development projects can often point to local pockets of success: examples of where a project has had real impact on smallholder livelihoods through some successful interventions. However the real challenge comes in taking such success to scale – this involves somehow embedding the processes that led to success into the ways of working of local … Continue reading
Feed scarcity in smallholder systems is a key constraint to improved livestock production in developing countries. However, development efforts which have taken a narrow technology-focused approach to dealing with feed scarcity have had limited success. In the Fodder Adoption Project, we experimented with the use of local stakeholder forums in our sites in Ethiopia to … Continue reading
Across the developing world, millions of smallholders keep livestock as a means of storing capital and as an insurance against hard times. This is a vital function for livestock – but it is associated with poverty. As demand for livestock products increases and systems become more intensive there are opportunities for subsistence livestock keepers to … Continue reading
After a session of the the November 2010 Fodder Adoption Project (FAP) workshop in Laos, we recorded ‘notes’ of three world cafe hosts who collated cross-project lessons (from Ethiopia, Syria, and Vietnam) on three issues: Innovation approaches, feed assessment, and scaling out. In this video, Werner Stür, formerly with CIAT in Vietnam, reports back on … Continue reading
After a session of the the November 2010 Fodder Adoption Project (FAP) workshop in Laos, we recorded ‘notes’ of three world cafe hosts who collated cross-project lessons (from Ethiopia, Syria, and Vietnam) on three issues: Innovation approaches, feed assessment, and scaling out. In this video, Ranjitha Puskur of ILRI reports on the lessons on innovation … Continue reading
After a session of the the November 2010 Fodder Adoption Project (FAP) workshop in Laos, we recorded ‘notes’ of three world cafe hosts who collated cross-project lessons (from Ethiopia, Syria, and Vietnam) on three issues: Innovation approaches, feed assessment, and scaling out. In this video, Michael Blümmel of ILRI reports back on the discussions about … Continue reading
Feeding innovation 