Platform for African – European Partnership in Agricultural Research for Development

Monday, September 30, 2013

2013 Agricultural Research for Development Conference

25-26th of September at SLU in Uppsala. 2013 Agricultural Research for Development Conference. This year the theme was Agricultural Research Towards Sustainable Development Goals.

The sub-themes were: 
  • Capacity Development 
  • Sustainable Intensification 
  • Climate Change 
  • Multi-disciplinarity
Prof. Hannah Akuffo (Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency and Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology (MTC) of the Karolinska Institutet) presented - Research Capacity Strengthening efforts toward Sustainable Development Goals – a perspective from Sida.


Prof. Hamidou Boly, coordinator TEAM-Africa (Tertiary Education for Agriculture Mechanism in Africa) presented TEAM-Africa which has the mandate from the African Union to support institutional reform and curriculum development in African universities. The aim is to improve food security and work for poverty alleviation in Africa

Context:
Frequent over grazing and increased population has led to a need for intensified and more productive land-use, including growing crops and trees. Cattle owners in Chepareria are nowadays less migratory, whilst in Kongelai migratory pastoralism is still dominating. There has also been migration into centres, e.g. the cattle based market in Chepareria has grown rapidly over the last decades.

Objectives:
An increasing understanding on how external and internal driving forces creates new pressures on
pastoralist land, which in turn prompts responses in terms of local land-use change and subsequently,
changes in the existing land management and property rights regime.Imperative research tasks in
this regard is to understand:
  1. under what conditions (driving forces and pressures) a traditional property rights regime is replaced by an alternative regime;
  2. what the individual and collective incentives (at different levels)for such a regime shift are;
  3. how a shift in management and property rights regimes is carried through in practice; 
  4. what the biophysical and socio-economic impacts of a regime shift are; and finally 
  5. whether new management- and property rights regimes, as a response to dynamic processes of change, can be easily classified as either open, individual, group, communal, or government property rights systems, or if it is better understood as the continuous negotiation of property rights as different actors at different levels respond to changing external and internal conditions.

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