Foreword Annual Report 2019

By Jimmy Smith and Lindsay Falvey

We are publishing the 2019 annual report of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) during a global pandemic whose impacts on human health and the global economy have already proven catastrophic. Both COVID-19 and recent events around the world have shown that inequalities of various kinds—social, racial and economic, among others—remain powerful forces that need to be addressed. At ILRI, we are committed to ensuring that our research on livestock contributes in a multitude of ways to addressing the current crisis, from preventing future pandemics to helping those most impacted by the present one. We are working on livestock solutions that help re-ignite economies, support health and nutrition, and build up sustainable and resilient food systems in the poorer parts of the world.

This report’s focus on gender is especially timely. Few societies in the world are free from inequalities arising from gender, as few are free from inequalities of race, status and multiple other kinds of division.

Homing in on gender is not simply a matter of focusing on women’s issues, as an earlier school of thought might have done. Rather, our focus is on the whole system of relationships and power dynamics that define the roles that women and men of all ages have in society. Livestock benefit from women’s work and women—countless millions of women in the developing world—benefit from livestock. Interventions, even ones that seem purely technocratic and neutral, such as animal vaccination programs, are often less effective than they could be if gender isn’t considered. Thus, ILRI was delighted this year to be selected as host of the CGIAR-wide platform on gender in agriculture. The platform will initiate a process of genuine change towards greater gender equality and better lives for smallholder farmers everywhere.

ILRI is pursuing equity across its workforce, with the percentage of professional women at ILRI (as categorized by CGIAR) currently at 34 per cent. ILRI’s current board of eleven trustees includes five women, including its chair-elect Elsa Murano, and ILRI’s senior management team of eight includes three women. ILRI is advancing towards 50 per cent participation by women and has put in place a variety of measures to increase the number of women in its ranks, such as ensuring that recruitments do not proceed unless female candidates are considered.

ILRI offices and staff worldwide — ILRI is co-hosted by the governments of Kenya and Ethiopia and has offices and staff in more than 14 countries in Asia, Africa and the Americas. In 2019, ILRI had 692 permanent staff, 398 male and 244 female, from 40 nations.

This year’s report features several field-based stories that illustrate ILRI’s research ‘in action’. We learn why it can be difficult for women to access vaccination programs for their animals in Ghana, how women are on the front lines of surveying and preventing future zoonotic disease outbreaks in Ethiopia, how young people are making a decent living for themselves through improved dairy production in Kenya and how a new green fodder variety is improving milk productivity and gender equity in India’s smallholder dairy sector. These stories are complemented by research examples from across ILRI’s portfolio, presenting solutions from laboratory to field that showcase ILRI initiatives to support institutions, develop capacity and conduct research on systems and policy solutions.

We do not as of this writing know what impact the current pandemic will have. However, as a scientific research institute dedicated to the people whose lives depend on livestock in the developing world, ILRI has a long record of addressing many of the issues that are now at the very centre of the global agenda, such as disease surveillance and control, climate change and environmental destruction, and hunger and malnutrition.

No matter what challenges may come in the months ahead, we at ILRI continue to focus on delivering livestock research that makes a difference to all.

Foreword

A gendered lens: Women, men and the future of livestock

Picture a livestock keeper in the developing world. In all likelihood, you are visualizing a man, perhaps herding cows and goats across a savanna or ploughing a piece of farmland with bullocks. The very term ‘animal husbandry’—which refers to the care, cultivation and breeding of animals—denotes masculine qualities, deriving as it does from late Old English (‘male head of a household’). But of course, it is not only men who keep livestock.

In fact, some two-thirds of the developing world’s hundreds of millions of poor livestock keepers are women, not men. In these countries, women, not men, perform most of the work in farm and herding households that goes into caring for animals. It is these women, not their menfolk, who do most of the day-to-day farm animal management as well as the processing, marketing and selling of the milk and eggs their animals produce. And it is developing-country women, not men, who typically make daily household decisions regarding a family’s chickens and other small stock.

The CGIAR gender platform

A renewed platform on gender aims to give greater voice to women farmers in the developing world Hosted by ILRI, the multi-centre collaborative effort will focus on gender equality and transformative food systems

Women farmers in the developing world face a host of challenges, from balancing domestic and agricultural chores to securing access to land and markets. To help women achieve gender equality in food systems, and to sustainably defeat hunger and enhance nutrition, CGIAR has launched a CGIAR GENDER Platform. The platform aims to create a ‘new normal’-a world in which greater gender equality drives more equitable, sustainable, productive and climate-resilient food systems.
ILRI is proud to serve as host for a new CGIAR-wide platform on gender issues in global agricultural research for development. Known as GENDER (Generating Evidence and New Directions for Equitable Results), the platform aims to help transform the way gender research is done, both within and beyond CGIAR, and to help kick-start a process of genuine change towards greater gender equality and better lives for smallholder farmers everywhere.

Jimmy Smith, director general of ILRI, stated, 'GENDER is well positioned to produce far-reaching and enduring impacts because it will aim to give a voice to the millions of women who today are mostly excluded from the extremely urgent efforts to produce enough, and good enough, food under the climate crisis. Only when both women and men are empowered to transform food systems can they successfully nourish families, communities and entire nations, today and in the future.'
Launched in January 2020, GENDER builds on a wealth of research and learning generated by the previous CGIAR Gender Network and the Collaborative Platform for Gender Research (2011–2019). It includes all 14 CGIAR research centres, 12 collaborative CGIAR research programs and 3 other CGIAR system-wide research support platforms and will forge alliances with change-makers in government, academia, national agricultural research extension systems and non-governmental organizations.

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ILRI's gender team

Nicoline de Haan
Senior scientist, Gender
I grew up in Ethiopia with a father who is a livestock specialist. But there was discussion on the farmer behind the cattle, and why was that always a man. This for me was an eye opener and started my curiosity in gender issues. There are opportunities and challenges out there that we need to address to make a more equitable world.
Alessandra Galiè
Senior scientist, Gender
In the year 2000 I was studying Arabic at the University of Damascus and working on a BA thesis on rural development in Syria. I found it striking how the literature, the informal talks, the official speeches talked about men farmers. Studying gendered expectations about ‘behaving woman-like or man-like’ vis-à-vis the daily reality of making ends meet emerged as a life passion.
Annet Mulema
Science officer, Gender and social inclusion
I was born in a family of 11 children (8 girls and 3 boys). Raising this number of girls was not easy for my parents, particularly my father. My parents were pitied by relatives and friends who believed that girls added no value to the family. But my parents valued and believed so much in treating boys and girls the same and with respect.
Renee Marie Bullock
Scientist, Gender and environment
I lived in Zambia from 2003 to 2005, and during this time saw women preparing meals and caring for children, while men cultivated new fields for cassava production. These experiences, in which families have let me into their daily lives and taken me in as another family member, have had a lifelong influence on me and continue to inspire the direction of my career.
Zoë Campbell
Postdoctoral fellow, Gender
My father raised me to be a curious naturalist. He encouraged me to eat krill out of ocean water so I could experience how a whale lives, to wonder why there was a perfect row of trees in the forest, and to think about geologic time and the forces of natural selection. I believe if we understand the messy and complicated systems we exist in, we can make them better.