Blog and Yammer

The first stakeholder workshop of the Livestock Data Innovation Project was held in Kampala on 20 May 2010. The Project team outlined the project rationale and purposes to a variety of stakeholders, including government, private sector, and NGOs. To foster a market-driven and pro-poor development of the livestock sector in Uganda, Tanzania and Niger, the project pilots new methods and tools to collect and analyze livestock sector data. These three countries are piloted countries to demonstrate how effective data collection/analysis can serve to enable sector development. The meeting discussions resulted in an appreciation that there are significant gaps in livestock data in Uganda, some due to lack or inadequate data. However, equally as evident is the gap in poor and uncoordinated communication between data users and data suppliers. Within this context, policy makers and private actors are limited in their ability to identify and implement appropriate policy and investment decisions to promote and support inclusive growth of the livestock sector. Stakeholders in the meeting agreed to participate in a ‘Livestock data user group for Uganda’ which will encourage continuous and transparent communication among livestock data users, livestock data suppliers and the project team   The objective of this group is to ensure that project outputs will respond to the needs and requirements of stakeholders and be supportive of an inclusive growth of the livestock sector.

A team of professionals was set up in Zambia to implement the Livestock Sector Investment and Policy Toolkit, a framework for livestock data and analysis developed through collaboration between AU-IBAR, the WB, FAO and CIRAD. The toolkit will support the new Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries Development to identify data needs in the livestock sector, create cross-Ministerial linkages with the Central Statistical Office (CSO) and foster effective sector advocacy for the sector through evidence-based decision making of the role of livestock in poverty reduction. In addition, it is proposed to bring in supportive technical support from the University of Zambia, Department of Agricultural Economics. During a meeting, Mr. Chewe Nkonde, a lecturer at the University, presented to the team his thesis work on "Determinants of Market Participation and Animal Health Management of Smallholder Livestock Producers in Zambia". This presentation provided a catalyst for discussion on 1) household data availability and gaps; 2) the interpretation of the some of the results; 3) potential collaboration with the university on this type of data analysis.