background

=Background=

An adequate supply of feed is crucial to ensure the satisfactory performance of livestock to support the livelihoods of millions of poor livestock keepers in developing countries. Depending on the system, feed is supplied from crop residues, grazing on common lands, private lands, forests, fallow agricultural lands, cultivated fodder crops and concentrates. While the increase in demand for livestock products in developing countries is seen as an opportunity for poor livestock keepers to supply this demand and improve their income and livelihoods, the reality is that availability and access to good quality feed is a major constraint to increasing livestock productivity.

Conventional approaches to research and development for increasing feed supply have tended to focus on finding technical solutions. This has included, for example, the promotion of new varieties of fodder crops (grasses, legumes, trees) including distribution of seeds, the application of technologies to improve the nutritive value of crop residues such as urea treatment. Despite these efforts, most attempts to deal with the feed scarcity issue have failed (Hall et al., 2007). These authors argue that ‘the availability of and access to fodder is no longer a mere technological issue, although new knowledge on fodder continues to be important.’ In addition to technologies it is essential to consider other ‘enabling factors’ that are required for successful adoption.

Recent research in ILRI has attempted to set the problem of feed scarcity within a broader innovation systems context (FIP and FAP projects). While this allows a broader coalition of actors to identify and test possible context specific approaches to improving nutrient supply to livestock, there is still a need to collect and evaluate technologies that might be worth considering. Indeed this is already happening in a number of ILRI Research for Development projects such as EADD, CSISA, ELKS, and others. However each of these projects is attempting to do this in isolation. There is no uniform framework for such an assessment.

The absence of a method to collect and evaluate a range of potential feed technologies from various dimensions (productivity, economic, social, labour, gender) is a challenge faced by development professionals aiming to select the most appropriate option in a given context. The innovation systems approach helps to put together all types of knowledge (technical, institutional, social, economic) through an intense consultative process involving different types of knowledge holders. Though this enables the analysis of technologies from an integrated perspective, it requires a relatively long time frame and considerable resources, and most importantly, the availability and willingness of multiple actors for many rounds of consultations. In addition, the number of technologies, which can realistically be considered in such an intensive process is limited. To speed up the process there could be merit in the development of a simple tool to analyse a wide range of technologies and draw up a ‘short list’ that might be worth considering and testing more intensively in a given setting. Such a toolbox would be of use to (i) development professionals, (ii) researchers and (iii) service delivery institutions.

Against this background, it is proposed to develop and field test an analytical tool for ‘technology prioritisation’ based on multiple perspectives.