Livestock Data for Decisions meeting at Lake Naivasha

“Livestock development has suffered from a dearth of data but we are starting to see some promising developments from many people in the room” stated Hannah Reed, from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, while opening the Livestock Data for Decisions meeting.

The Livestock Data for Decisions community regularly meets to share expert knowledge, data, and innovations pertaining to livestock. This year the meeting was held at Lake Naivasha in Kenya.

The Livestock Data for Decisions community is facilitated by Supporting Evidence-Based Interventions (SEBI), which aims to improve the livelihoods of poor livestock farmers in developing countries by delivering evidence based interventions to sustainably improve livestock productivity.

Andrew Ash, Mario Herrero, Di Mayberry, Jeda Palmer and Brendan Power participated in the meeting and presented an update of our LiveGAPS work, which aims to sustainably increase livestock yields in Tanzania and Nigeria. Andrew Ash and Di Mayberry discussed our livestock modelling, highlighting our processes, outputs and data needs. Mario Herrero and Brendan Power presented our apps – developed to make our LiveGAPS work publically available and easy to explore and visualise. This work was well received by the community. Out of this came several new partners, for example GALVmed that would like a lot more engagement from us. In addition, we connected with people from diverse organisations, for example the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the University of Edinburgh, and ‎International Development Research Centre (IDRC) that may be able to provide livestock data to improve our modelling capability for our LiveGAPS work.

An opportunity to get up close to the animals for which Lake Naivasha is home was provided by an early morning boat ride on the lake – an ideal time to see the hippopotamuses wallowing in the lake shallows, a mighty colony of cormorants undertaking morning rituals, and the zebra, giraffe and antelope grazing at the lake edge.

Photo credit: Jeda Palmer.

Get to know Livestock Data for Decisions community members Harriet Kasidi Mugera  (World Bank),  Brian King (CIAT), and Brian Perry (University of Edinburgh / University of Oxford), highlighting the value of the Livestock Data for Decisions meeting and important outcomes from the meeting for them and their organisations.