In Nov 2014, to better assess the efficiency of these innovation platforms and to document their successes and challenges in different developing countries, Humidtropics launched an Innovation Platforms Case Study Competition. In Feb 2015, twelve candidates were selected to participate in a writeshop focused on writing strong, reflective and cohesive case studies. Earlier this month (Jun 2015), jury members in an editors’ meeting reviewed all the final submissions and chose eight cases to be featured in a Humidtropics Anthology to be published by an academic publisher before the end of 2015; the jury also recommended that two cases be published separately. Continue reading
Category Archives: ILRI
Scarce, but real, resources (a little essay on the dairy cow prototype and refineries of the future)
Information, ideas and technologies generated by research provide the skeleton on which human development everywhere and at all times depends. New ideas, embedded in technological change, drive human growth, allowing us to escape the grim statistics that haunt peoples of the developed world and the hardships that face peoples of the developing world. Continue reading
Happy World Environment Day!
Happy World Environment Day 2015. Don’t forget to celebrate the world’s domestic farm animals! Continue reading
New project promises more productive chickens for Africa’s smallholders
A new four-year African Chicken Genetic Gains (ACGG) project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will run from 2015 to 2019 and work to genetically improve Africa’s chickens and to better deliver the superior chickens to small-scale farmers. Continue reading
Influencing developing-country decision-makers: 14 things that work–or don’t
Here is some useful advice on what developing-country decision-makers tend to listen to and what they tend to ignore. These excerpts are from a blog post of 12 May 2015 by Duncan Green, strategic adviser for Oxfam GB and author of Oxfam’s blog and book titled From Poverty to Power. Continue reading
Feeding livestock; feeding learning: New ILRI platform extends access to livestock knowledge
On 22 May 2015, to make the FEAST tool more widely available, a FEAST e-Learning course was launched in Addis Ababa. It is the initial product on ILRI’s new learning management system. Continue reading
Fragments d’ILRI: La viande dans nos assiettes, les vies dans nos lunettes
Ce billet d’opinion offert par Jimmy Smith, directeur général du Centre International pour la Recherche sur l’Elevage (ILRI) est paru le 23 février 2015 dans The Economist, dans sa version anglaise ‘The Meat We Eat, the Lives We Lift’. Il reprend les critiques exprimées à l’encontre de l’élevage à la loupe pour comprendre la perspective différente entre le monde développé et en développement sur cette question. Continue reading
Food scares: Agrifood systems everywhere need greater cooperation and investments in safer foods and farming
An interesting, if scary, read is chapter 6 of the recently launched flagship report of IFPRI on reducing and managing food scares, co-written by Delia Grace at ILRI and John McDermott, who directs the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health, led by IFPRI. Continue reading
Chickens rule — Everywhere — Everyday — Every way
When, exactly, did the chicken move out of our backyards and into our front rooms, taking over our kitchens and imaginations? When did it stop being a bird peasants kept to serve up the occasional egg, and the daily morning crow, and become meat for daily gobbling? Continue reading
Managing the most nutritious, and riskiest, foods in the informal markets of developing countries
A new book compiling 25 contemporary studies on food safety in Africa’s informal markets offers (surprising) lessons for much of the developing world. Continue reading