The Animal Health theme of the Livestock and Fish CGIAR Research Program met last week for a two-day planning meeting at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), Nairobi campus. This was a preliminary meeting organized in advance of the week long program research planning meeting to be held on 24-28 March in Naivasha, Kenya.

Meeting participants updated their overall plans for the coming years and worked on elements of the program’s 2015-2022 Strategic Implementation Plan.

Led by ILRI scientist Phil Toye, the Animal Health theme is one of the three technology platforms of the program whose objective is to generate data and materials to improve the pro-poor management of animal health and food safety in the targeted value chains. East Coast fever, contagious bovine pleuro-pneumonia, peste de petit ruminants and African Swine fever are some of the livestock diseases that the team is working on.

A long term visioning exercising that mapped out what individual theme members and the group as a collective would have liked to achieve in 2023 was carried out. The exercise provided an excellent platform for the detailed review of the theme’s plans where specific activities, milestones and deliverable for 2015-2016 as well as 2017-2019 were discussed and sketched out.

Outputs from this preliminary meeting will be further discussed and refined through the interactions and exchanges with other program researchers at the end of March meeting.