The poster was prepared for Tropentag 2012: Resilience of Agricultural Systems against Crises, Gottingen, Germany, 19-21 September 2012. It briefed the objective, approaches, achievements and lessons of the Improving Productivity and Market Success (IPMS) project.
Group work by participants in the SEARCA Forum-workshop on Platforms, Rural Advisory Services, and Knowledge Management: Towards Inclusive and Sustainable Agricultural and Rural Development, Los Banos, 17-19 May 2016.
Feedback from participants in the SEARCA Forum-workshop on Platforms, Rural Advisory Services, and Knowledge Management: Towards Inclusive and Sustainable Agricultural and Rural Development, Los Banos, 17-19 May 2016.
The Livestock and Irrigation Value Chains for Ethiopian Smallholders (LIVES) project is funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Canada. The LIVES capacity development pillar seeks to strengthen innovation and the learning capacity of value chain actors and service providers to develop livestock and irrigation agriculture value chains. Using participatory processes to assess knowledge and skills gaps of value chain actors and service providers, it identifies capacity development interventions. Project staff then design and implement these interventions
The CGIAR Research Program on Livestock and Fish aims to increase the productivity of small-scale livestock and fish systems in sustainable ways, making meat, milk and fish more available and affordable across the developing world. This project analyzed the current gender capacities against desired future gender capacities of the Livestock and Fish partners and subsequently designed tailor-made capacity development interventions.
Ethiopian needs to achieve accelerated agricultural development along a sustainable commercialization path to alleviate poverty and ensure overall national development. In this regard, sustainable commercial of smallholder dairying provides a viable and growing opportunity; with deliberate, appropriate and sustained policy support. A recent empirical analysis concludes however, that Ethiopian smallholder dairy sub-sector has not been able to take-off despite decades of development interventions.
This guide is developed by synthesizing successful field experiences within a project known as Improving Productivity & Market Success of Ethiopian Farmers Project or IPMS Project. The main purpose of the IPMS project was to test methods, approaches, and processes that can help transform Ethiopian smallholder agriculture from subsistence to a market‐oriented agriculture.
Innovation platforms are groups of individuals or stakeholder representatives with different backgrounds and interests. They come together to diagnose problems, identify opportunities, and find ways to achieve their goals. When innovation platforms are set up by development projects, their processes are usually facilitated by the support organization.
Agriculture is central to Ethiopian economy but its sustainable development faces enormous challenges. Low innovation capacity, low productivity, dwindling natural resources and climate change, small-scale subsistence farming, and low levels of market integration and value addition have all made agricultural development more complex. In spite of the decades of research and development efforts, the rate of growth for both crop and livestock productivity has remained low.
This paper uses household and key informant survey data from Ethiopia to: (1) understand the organizational structures that influence change in dairy production systems; (2) explore how local-level innovation system networks are functioning in the smallholder dairy production and (3) identify intervention points for strengthening innovation capacity. Results revealed that public sector actors are the major role players in the dairy production system despite their minor role in marketing linkages. We also found out that the private sector actors play peripheral roles in the network.