An Innovation Platform for Small Livestock in Botswana

A group of some twenty farmers, researchers, government officials and private industry representatives are gathered around a table at the Botswana College of Agriculture to figure out a roadmap for how they can work together.

Botswana is a diamond-rich, sparsely populated country known for raising fine beef cattle. This group, however, is concerned with the small livestock, such as sheep and goats that most small-scale farmers rely upon to supplement subsistence farming.

Market research has shown great potential for a goat meat industry in Botswana, but in order for the industry to grow, the infrastructure needs to fall in to place—and accomplishing that is no easy task. Currently, most farmers own animals in small numbers, and have no way to access distant markets in Gaborone, the capital city.

The barriers at every step of the way are considerable: transporting the animals is prohibitively expensive, and there are currently no facilities in the country equipped for slaughtering goats on a large scale. This project, now in the pilot stage, is seeking to create a platform for all of the different actors who play a role in the small stock value chain—from farmers to butchers to researchers to marketers to retailers—so that they all have a better understanding of how the overall system works, and how to create value and maximize profits within that system.

The Small Stock Innovation Platform, as the initiative is called, is one of the key tangible outcomes of the Strengthening Capacity in Agricultural Research for Development in Africa (SCARDA) program, which focused on strengthening capacity in agricultural research systems in selected countries and institutions in all three sub-regions of Sub-Saharan Africa.

SCARDA took a unique approach to the challenge of capacity-strengthening. The first order of business was to comprehensively study and understand the needs of the focal institutions, and the larger agricultural systems in which they operated. Scoping studies were conducted at the national level, and then at the various institutions, which provided a holistic view of the systems, revealing the specific gaps that hindered their  performance.

SCARDA’s key innovation was that it sought a holistic approach to building capacity. The program developed from the results of a study conducted by the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA), which found that many capacity-building efforts were ineffective because they focused simply on training individuals, rather than addressing the needs and challenges of the systems in which they operated.

As a first step, SCARDA supported the focal institutions in undertaking their own institutional analyses. The process involved assembling a clear picture of both the internal dynamics of the organization itself, and the external factors that influenced the national agricultural research system in which the organization operated.