Irma Stern, Zanzibar Woman with Chicken, 1957 (via Wikiart).
Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral.
—Frank Lloyd Wright
The most common of all the world’s livestock species, and till now one of the least attended to by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), is flying straight into ILRI’s research agenda for Africa through a new five-year African Chicken Genetic Gains (ACGG) project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The project involves several institutions and will run from 2014 to 2019. It will work to genetically improve Africa’s chickens and to better deliver the superior chickens to small-scale farmers. It has four main aims: reduce poverty, raise productivity, increase consumption of animal protein in poor households and empower rural women. Beyond the project’s three target countries—Ethiopia, Nigeria and Tanzania—the germplasm, data and knowledge generated should also benefit millions of poor households in other countries where backyard chicken production remains a mainstay of rural and peri-urban livelihoods.
Employing the latest technologies in ‘new genetics’, the multidisciplinary and multi-institutional project team will work with national experts and partners to improve Africa’s local breeds—with the aim of producing pre-vaccinated high-producing birds with low-feed requirements and well-suited to local conditions—and to speed their delivery to those who need them most. The project will also be working with farmers to test their preferences for “exotic” strains, especially those from India, and where these are preferred, to enhance farmer access to the strains and potentially improve the strains in-line with farmer preferences.
The African Chicken Genetic Gains project plans to leverage existing research and innovative approaches to develop and supply improved chicken genetics for the poultry value chains of the three target countries. The project will emphasize:
- High-producing birds well-adapted to low-input production systems
- Farmer preferred breeds
- Innovation platforms to help develop and spread solutions across value chains
- Public-private partnerships to advance the breeding, multiplication and delivery work
- Targetting poor women
The project will work to achieve all of the following:
- Data-driven and culturally relevant understanding of the types of chickens poor farmers, especially women, prefer
- A productive multi-country network of public-private partnerships for long-term chicken genetic improvement that employs modern tools to drive accelerated genetic gains and to deliver more productive, farmer-preferred breeds
- Smallholders access to their preferred local breeds that have been pre-vaccinated and genetically enhanced so as to be at least 200% more productive
- Evidence that adoption of the improved chicken genotypes indeed leads to significantly increased production, productivity, income, and household consumption of animal-source foods among smallholders
- Evidence of increased empowerment of women smallholder farmers in chicken value chains
First announced during one of ILRI’s 40-year anniversary events on 1 November 2014 (when the project was officially funded), the project actually officially kicked off 18–19 May 2015 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. At the project’s first management team meting, all the partners promised strong integration across all three countries and all thematic teams. Tadelle Dessie, an Ethiopian animal geneticist and breeder based at ILRI’s campus in Addis Ababa, is leading the project, which contributes to ILRI’s global livestock genetics program, LiveGene. Dessie spelt out the broad outlines of ACGG at the project management meeting in a slide presentation (below).
In addition to ILRI, the main partners in the ACGG project are Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria supported technically by the Federal University of Agriculture, in Abeokuta, Nigeria (FUNAAB); the Tanzania Livestock Research Institute (TALIRI) supported technically by Sokoine University of Agriculture (SUA) in Tanzania; the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research (EIAR) in Ethiopia; the Animal Breeding and Genetics Centre at Wageningen University and Research Centre, in the Netherlands (Wageningen UR); and PICO Eastern Africa.
See all the slide presentations made at the first ACGG project management meeting (May 2015):