Livestock and irrigation value chains for Ethiopian smallholders (LIVES)
The project, Livestock and irrigation value chains for Ethiopian smallholders (LIVES) is an initiative designed by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) and their national partners to build upon the success of the Canadian International Development Agency-funded project, Improving Productivity and Market Success of Smallholders in Ethiopia (IPMS).
Since 2005, IPMS has helped to create in its pilot areas an enabling environment in which the public sector, smallholder farmers and private-sector agents are empowered to increase the production and productivity of crops and livestock through participatory, market-oriented development. The successes resulted from applying innovation systems approaches to identify and exploit opportunities in commodity value chains.
LIVES will not only build on these lessons but also introduce new approaches and interventions, and will scale up and out, focusing on a more limited number of value chains, and emphasizing the development of sustained capacity that will continue to have impact beyond the life of the project.
Goal
To contribute to enhanced income and gender equitable wealth creation for smallholders and other value chain actors through increased and sustained market offtake of high-value livestock and irrigated crop commodities.
Purpose
To improve competitiveness, sustainability and equity in value chains for selected high-value livestock and irrigated crop commodities in target areas of four regions of Ethiopia.
Objectives
- To facilitate the identification, targeting and promotion of improved technologies and organizational and institutional innovations to develop the value chains of selected high-value livestock and irrigated crop commodities;
- To improve the capacity of the value chain actors and the support services at the different administrative levels (from kebele [neighbourhood] to national level) to develop the selected value chains and respond to emerging challenges and opportunities;
- To improve generation, access, flow and use of knowledge relevant to the value chains within and amongst the different administrative levels (from kebele to national level);
- To generate knowledge through action-oriented research on and synthesis of lessons learnt about, value-chain development; and
- To facilitate the promotion and dissemination of principles and good practices for the development of value chains.
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