Lay off of my shoes!

One does not usually eat shoes, but I find they are just as desirable as food.

Click here to learn how this...



    ...can be turned into this.


Blue suede shoes
Elvis Presley, The essential Elvis Presley, Strategic marketing

Come on, dance and sing!

 

Yesterday was the first Friday of the month and like every first Friday of the month, there was a barbeque and karaoke night on the ILRI Nairobi campus, organized by the Housing, catering and conferencing team for the staff, their family and guests. Great food: hamburgers, chicken legs and mutton steaks, all grilled by the chefs upon request. I had the mutton with chips and fresh tomatoes and found they were delicious. The bar at the ILRI Enkare Club would serve you any drink you wanted at a very reasonable price.

And there was music with a DJ. Live music too: we were the ones doing it with the karaoke. After Asian karaoke in Bangkok, I had a great time with African karaoke. I must try to learn the tunes to local Swahili songs as the words are easy to follow because they are written in the Latin alphabet. The closest I could get to singing an African song was The lion sleeps tonight.



Colleagues were having a great time eating, drinking, singing, and dancing. People would just rise up from their chairs and start swaying their hips in time with the music. It seems they know how to party here. So I am really looking forward to the ILRI Christmas dinner in early December. We may all be committed to improving agricultural systems in which livestock are important at ILRI, but it is still important to relax and enjoy other things than work with colleagues.


Everybody
Madonna, Madonna, Sire/Warner Bros

Gotta go back, back, back to school again

To read about my first experience in teaching animal production systems and markets of developing countries to young postgraduate students, click here.

Back to school again

Soundtrack from the original motion picture Grease 2, Paramount

Photo: Eugène Trutat

There were hundreds of them

I have just completed my first full week in Nairobi. The most striking feature has been the weather. It started by being relatively hot and humid. I was complaining about it to my new colleagues and they all said: "don't worry; by the end of this week, it will rain." Indeed, on Thursday it started raining hard and the weather has clearly moved on from sunny and hot to rainy and cool. There are at least three downpours every day, which makes traffic even worse than in normal conditions.

I thought I would be able to wait until I had settled down in Nairobi permanently in November before I started looking for a new choir. I guess I really missed singing because on Wednesday night I started to search for the contact details of the Nairobi Music Society, which I had heard of by pure chance when in Paris. After trying out several outdated email addresses and phone numbers I had found on the Internet, I finally got the email of the President of the NMS (it is hidden in About of their Facebook page). So I wrote to Valerie Kent on Friday informing her that I was interested in joining the choir as soon as possible for their next concert.

She called me back late that same evening. I could come and sing with them and several other choirs for a combined choir performance of Messiah on the very next day! Rehearsal started at 9.30 for a 15.00 performance. So I spent my Saturday singing Haendel's Messiah.

We were 400 singers and a full orchestra playing what was probably Mozart's orchestration of the piece, with a complete wind and brass section which I had never heard before. It was really exhilarating to sing and hear close to another hundred tenor voices behind me. After the smaller baroque versions I had sung with Choeur Varenne last year, and my last French concert with only 24 singers in the Métaboles choir last August, it was quite a change. The audience enjoyed it. They got up for a standing ovation as soon as the piece was over and they asked for more after the flowers had been given to the conductor Mark Statler and the commendable local soloists. Of course, we sang the Hallelujah chorus again.

Such a shame that the weather was so bad. There was heavy rain in the morning and a long downpour at lunch time. So instead of enjoying the pilau, chapati, curried stew and mixed salad that had been prepared for us under the sun on the lawn, we were probably a hundred taking turns huddling underneath the marquis to eat while standing in the mud.

Nonetheless, after having sung four years with the Bangkok Music Society, I look forward to equally fulfilling music making with the Nairobi Music Society. The next programme will be the traditional Christmas concert with carols.

Holocaust of giants
Rasputina, Sister kinderhook, Filthy bonnet recording studio Co.

How do I feel by the end of the day... of a strategic retreat

I have been involved this whole week in the strategic retreat of the Changing Demand and Institutions Team at ILRI. It has been a very intensive exercise involving all the team members. I got to meet all my new colleagues.

The team leader Derek Baker wanted us collectively to write a conceptual framework for value chain analysis. This document is meant to serve as a common method for the team to respond to the various research questions our development partners will be asking us to solve.

We spent most of the first three days sharing ideas on team building and value chain analysis methods and tools. Epi Katjiuongua, Sirak Bahta and Nadhem Mtimet gave presentations on value chain performance indicators and methods for robust sampling of livestock traders in developing country contexts. But in general, Derek had limited powerpoint presentations to a minimum, preferring more interactive methods of knowledge sharing.

Acho Okike facilitated a workshop on who we were as a team, what we did and who we worked for.

Francis Wanyoike and I held a brainstorming exercise on why it was important to do whole livestock value chain analysis. In just five minutes and only three rounds of interventions from the colleagues present, we managed to fill up two flipcharts.

 I also facilitated a workshop on the different methods we could use to respond to value chain issues. We held two subgroup discussions too. The first was to come up with an outline for our conceptual framework. During the second subgroup discussion  we projected ourselves in three years time to decide who we wanted to be, what we would do, and who we would be working for. This was the mirror exercise to the first one facilitated by Acho. We all hope our team's work will be clearly focused on solving the issues of the poor and livestock value chain actors in three years' time.

Thursday and Friday was extremely studious. Derek had booked three meeting rooms in ILRI campus where he virtually locked us up for the collective write up of our conceptual framework. Colleagues passing by the meeting room were surprised to see a group of scientists gathered around a meeting table, but each one of us was bent over our laptop computers typing out our ideas without exchanging a word. Perhaps a result of too much discussion over the previous three days?

Derek had also ordered sandwiches into the meeting room so that we did not have to go to the canteen for lunch breaks. Motivated by the deadline of Friday 17.00 for the first draft of our conceptual framework, I guess we all kept on going, fueled by a generous provision of coffee, tea and biscuits.

I am delighted to say that we made it! Our conceptual framework for value chain analysis has been written up by 14.30 today. We will all go back to our respective duty stations with the first draft to read and improve upon. I look forward to using it to respond to the research questions of our institutional partners. 

I also look forward to the week end... This has been focus-intensive teamwork conducted under a tight deadline.

With a little help from my friends
The Beatles, The Beatles 1967-1970, EMI

All photos except coffee break: Nadhem Mtimet

This littly piggy went to market

I have just joined ILRI’s Changing Demand and Institutions Team as an Agricultural Economist based in Nairobi, Kenya. I am delighted to be back in the development business and to be able to blog about it!

Only two days into my new position I joined a team of colleagues already working in rural Uganda on the Livestock Data Innovation Project (LDIP). The objective of this project is to strengthen the capabilities of national statistical and veterinary services in collecting and analysing livestock data. The project is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and implemented by ILRI, the World Bank and FAO, in collaboration with the African Union Interafrican Bureau of Animal Resources. 

ILRI’s contribution to this project is to develop the methods and tools that will enable local development partners, veterinary services and statistical departments to understand better the structure of livestock production and marketing systems in their country. The objective of this trip to Uganda was to continue testing the group interview workshop method to collect quantitative data and the constraints analysis workshop method to collect more qualitative data on local dairy and pig production and marketing systems. The ILRI team comprised animal breeding experts Julie Ojango and Ben Lukuyu, the animal health expert Henry Kiara, and my economist colleagues Derek Baker and Nadhem Mtimet. The workshops with producers went very well thanks to the logistical support of ILRI’s Diana Oduor and facilitation and translation help from our local consultants and project partners. Despite the important human resources mobilized for this exercise and some more work needed to strengthen the sampling method, Derek believes this method is a cost-effective way to collect reasonably robust statistical data from farmers.

The concept is to gather around 35 producers dealing with the product we are interested in from one area into one large room so that they may complete the interview questionnaire individually, though with the help of the research team and their producer friends and local veterinarians. We had asked the local veterinary counterparts to sample the producers for us in order to get a wide selection ranging from smallholders to medium-sized agribusinesses. The questionnaire filling exercise took around four hours including a tea break and we are confident the data collected is robust as the research team was assisting all the time. 

On Friday afternoon I facilitated a value chain constraints analysis workshop with a group of six pig producers from Wakiso District. The objective of the workshop was to identify the marketing constraints the producers were facing to develop their pig production enterprises. We first started by mapping out the pig value chain in the district. 

I then asked the producers to state their objectives in terms of developing their pig enterprise.

 

Finally, I invited the farmers to list the one most important constraint they were facing to reach their development objective. I narrowed down the list to four items by asking the farmers to identify the most important and the second most important constraints. We then linked these to ILRI’s hypotheses of five major constraints faced by livestock producers: land and water, labour, capital, knowledge and information, and other (government policies, institutions, infrastructure etc.).

Further analysis of all the data collected through these producer workshops will enable us to identify the constraints faced by livestock producers in Uganda and Tanzania, and to link these with their general characteristics and choices of production systems.

This little piggy
Traditional nursery rhyme
This little piggy - 30 favourite songs and rhymes about animals on 1 CD, BBC Audiobooks

No worries for the rest of your days

 

I have just joined the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) as an agricultural economist in the institute's Markets, gender and livelihoods Theme. For the first time in my life, I will be based in Africa. This is a thrilling professional and personal experience for me.

I landed on Monday of last week in my new home base: Nairobi, Kenya. After just two days of administrative meetings, I joined a team already working in Uganda where I got acquainted with hilly green landscapes, slow-moving traffic, mashed plantain and sweet potato chips with meat stew, Lake Victoria and its grilled tilapia fish, and the easy-going attitude to life in Africa.

The long Ugandan traffic jams were perfect to share horror stories of traffic jams, food safety and overall security concerns for expatriates living in Nairobi. My team leader nonetheless put the record straight during our first one-on-one meeting: Nairobi is a very pleasant city to live in if one sticks to common sense and stays vigilant on security.

The next few months are going to be somewhat complicated with relocation, finding accommodation, buying a car, getting used to a new environment, finding appropriate groceries for my cooking, looking for musical opportunities etc. The whole process will be made even more stressful by the fact that my father is currently recovering in hospital in France following a very serious illness and several major surgical operations; I shall be shuttling between France and Kenya to help take care of him.

I will thus try to learn this lesson well:

Hakuna matata
Soundtrack from the film The lion king, Disney