The Livestock and Fish program’s third annual ‘performance monitoring report‘ provides insights into its progress, results and challenges in the past year.

In its third year in 2014, the program maintained its steady output of research results from its technology platforms to support sustainable livestock and aquaculture intensification, and began reviewing the lessons learned so far in implementing its value chain approach for enhancing impact.

Upstream, new capacity to support research on fish health and feeds has created exciting opportunities for synergies on technical research across the species reflected in a presentation at a fish health meeting and interactions to align the development of processes and procedures in the repository and data system between WorldFish with those at ILRI.

The genetics team succeeded in securing major funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for two new projects on dairy and chicken genetics that seek to demonstrate how new advances and tools in genomics can deliver better-suited breeds to farmers in a shorter time frame.

Downstream, activities were successfully initiated in the Bangladesh aquaculture value chain, strongly complementing the existing work of the Aquatic Agricultural Systems (AAS) CRP. In the better-established sites in Ethiopia, Uganda, Egypt and Tanzania, effort shifted from a focus on assessment to testing of technological and institutional innovations. A CRP-commissioned external evaluation of the program’s value chain approach endorsed the value of the approach and progress achieved, and offered guidance on addressing many of the challenges that remain to fully realize the potential of the approach.

The program has continued to address the challenges cited in the 2013 report, namely adaptively managing the under-resourced components in the ambitious plan of work described in the program proposal, nurturing interdisciplinarity—including mainstreaming gender dimensions—as part of the value chain approach, and establishing a monitoring and evaluation system based on the program’s Theory of Change and appropriate for research-for-development.

To improve integration both across disciplines and between the discovery and delivery components, three of the CRP Themes (Value Chain Development; Targeting Sustainable Innovation; Gender & Learning) were re-organized into two Flagships: Systems Analysis for Sustainable Intensification and Value Chain Transformation & Scaling. This new structure enhances integration of the various cross-cutting, mainly social science activities to work more closely together within the Systems Analysis Flagship, while giving more emphasis to the role of the value chain teams and their engagement with development partners as the Value Chain Flagship. The new Flagships were prepared during 2014 and came into effect in January 2015.

Download the report

See also this update on some highlights in 2014