1. Dairy Innovation Platform
This will be the starting phase of the multi-stakeholder engagement. The first phase aims at developing an innovation platform that would synthesize existing pieces of evidence on dairy breeding, feed, health, milk processing and business development, co-develop research protocols to guide future research and develop a digital data-sharing platform for National Agricultural Research Systems (NARS) and universities. Members in this platform will be primarily open to research actors, with controlled involvement of public extension/development and private sector actor’s engagement.
The platform will feature, the following:
- Systematic reviews of past research: This helps them to synthesize evidence, identify innovations and policy and advisory messages from past research.
- Forming a functional platform under a “Collation of the Willing”; This includes research and development actors who are willing and able to influence the research and development agenda.
- Develop common research protocols: This involves developing common protocols for data collection, analysis, and reporting to foster comparability of results across the research system.
- Develop digital data sharing protocol: This enables smooth and trust-based sharing research data.
- Dedicated scaling mindset and resource: Scaling organized around use cases to ensure knowledge translation into innovation and use at a scale. This involves developing a scaling protocol and committing resources to navigate and champion the early stages of the scaling process.
2. National Learning Alliance on Dairy Sector Development
This platform will bring together the Dairy Innovation Platform with public dairy development actors, private dairy businesses and development partners. The learning alliance will serve the purpose of:
- Information sharing among dairy actors on good dairy practices
- Deliberation and dialogue with policymakers, private businesses and development partners.
3. Facilitation and collection action through collaboration and coordination
The National Learning Alliance (NLA) will be established first at the national level and could have regional and sub-regional chapters as needed. The NLA will have three bodies, a steering committee (to be chaired by the state minister), a secretariat and a general assembly. The NLA activities will be guided by a dynamic social learning strategy to guide information sharing, deliberations and collection actions.
4. Ethiopian Dairy Board
This will be a formal body to guide long-term dairy development pathways in Ethiopia. The innovation platform and the National Learning Alliance will serve as functional wings to the dairy board, but the dairy board mandates go beyond voluntary contribution by actors and go in the direction of binding and formal organizational setup.
