Southern Africa Rural Livelihoods Consortium
Project Description
The goal of the Rural Livelihoods Consortium is to strengthen linkages between members of the research community in the southern Africa region and the end-users of research. This collaboration focuses on creating a regional network to create permanent linkages between the research community and resource-poor and small-scale commercial farmers. This partnership draws on the strategic thinking and technical knowledge of US universities with significant experience working in the region to collaborate with Southern African universities, IARCs, NGOs, National Agricultural Research Centers, and private industry in South Africa, Malawi, and Zambia. These countries share common problems of drought, gender inequalities, and HIV/AIDS impacting agricultural productivity. The Consortium is organized in technical clusters to focus on resource-appropriate production systems that mitigate the impact of HIV/AIDS on agricultural production: seed technology, irrigation, low input and conservation farmers, post harvest processing, marketing, gender, HIV/AIDS. The members of the technical clusters identify existing best practices and appropriate technologies that improve nutrition and/or require less labor, adapt practices and technologies to better suit specific agro ecologic or social constraints, identify and target options and opportunities to accelerate smallholder-based agricultural growth leading to more efficient and profitable use of resources, facilitate cooperation among partners through meetings and electronic networking, deliver training modules for cluster themes, develop methods for transferring knowledge and best practices, and design evaluation protocols to improve content and delivery. The Consortium facilitates strengthening of linkages between research institutions and dissemination of best practices and appropriate technologies through local and international NGOs. The Consortium addresses the goals of the Initiative to End Hunger in Africa by creating a strong multi-country network to induce and encourage agricultural growth and by identifying and targeting best practices and appropriate technologies to accelerate smallholder-based agricultural growth, leading to more efficient and profitable use of resources.
