Governments in many countries are decentralising to give more control over decision making and budgets to local administrations. One expectation of this change is that local governments will more effectively and efficiently respond to the poorest citizens in their jurisdictions. Decentralisation is especially significant to forest communities, which have historically benefited little from government services and poverty reduction programmes because of their physical isolation and social marginalisation.

The overall aim of this study was to explore what the development community can do, or facilitate, to significantly improve livelihoods in semi-arid systems.The authors based their analysis on two case-study sites in the communal lands of southern Zimbabwe. The main tool was a detailed livelihood questionnaire, supplemented by participatory appraisal and observation, action research, biophysical analysis and systems modelling.

Livestock are recognized as essential assets for the livelihoods of poor farmers in the mixed crop-livestock systems throughout the tropics, while feed resources have been identified as an important constraint to their productivity. Two international agricultural research institutes, CIMMYT and ILRI, therefore joined forces in a project designed to improve the value of maize as livestock feed with an aim of enhancing the livelihoods of maize-livestock farmers in East-Africa.

This publication provides sharper focus on reducing poverty where it is most absolute and most wide spread. This review outlines a new strategic goal, collaborative ways in which the institute is enhancing its responsiveness to the fast - changing global environment; and five new research themes, viz, Targeting opportunities, Enabling Innovations, Market opportunities, Biotechnology and people, and Livestock and the Environment. The review also identifies three broad pathways, viz security assets, improving productivity, and accessing markets.

This annual report addresses the partnerships that have enhanced ILRI's work at national, regional and international levels, highlighting three particularly inspiring ventures - poverty mapping in East Africa, the Crop-Animal Systems Research Network in Southeast Asia, and development of an improved East Coast fever vaccine, which has engaged researchers from three continents. The five research themes into which ILRI restructured its research portfolio are also outlined.

This annual report takes as its theme the central challenge facing the institute and its partners at the start of the new millennium: making the livestock revolution work for the poor. It is a companion report to the institutes new strategic plan, which takes the revolution as its basis in determining how ILRI's programme should evolve in the first decade of the 21st century. The report begins and ends on a farm in central Ethiopia, whose mixed crop-livestock producers are just beginning to participate in the expanding dairy market of the country's capital, Addis Ababa.

In Ethiopia, intensification of agricultural production is the primary focus of the government’s poverty reduction strategy. Livestock constitute an invaluable resource providing essential goods and services to small-scale poor farmers and their families and communities. Production of high valued livestock products provides a route out of poverty especially where growing urban demand fuels the markets. Water security is a requisite input for livestock production and its resultant contribution to poverty reduction.

This 2010-12 MTP presents relatively few adjustments to research plans from the previous MTP. One main cross-cutting change in the ILRI research program in 2010 will be to accelerate efforts to align research activities to the livestock development challenges presented. In preparation for that, ILRI is conducting a center-commissioned external review in 2009 looking at research into sustainable intensification of smallholder crop-livestock systems to provide a review of past activities and advice on this future focal area.

This presentation starts with a discussion on the need of this study and outlines its framework. It then assesses in detail how to attack poverty, and tries to answer the question where do livestock and their diseases fit in? Then it presents the study design and how it is achieved. It then presents a quantitative assessment of poverty, and looks into qualitative approach, poverty indicators, livestock production systems, priority species for the poor along with their objectives and step to achieving them. It then presents an assessment of disease impact with examples.