University’s Tabeisa Project Wins Queen’s Anniversary Prize

16 November 2007

'Design4Life Ghana' is now being extended to 'Design4Life Africa' © University of Greenwich

The University of Greenwich has won a prestigious Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher & Further Education, for the work of the Tabeisa Project to encourage and support entrepreneurship in Africa. The Tabeisa Project is led by Professor John Humphreys of the University of Greenwich, working with partners in Coventry University and four higher education institutions in Africa. This is the third time that the University has won a Queen’s Anniversary Prize, and the second time that it has won one for work that aims to improve livelihoods in the developing world.

 

Professor Andrew Westby, NRI’s Director of Research and Enterprise, says: “NRI is delighted that the Tabeisa Project team has won this Prize. Tabeisa’s aims are clearly related to NRI’s enterprise development activities, and John Humphreys has been working very closely with NRI’s research teams in recent years. The Tabeisa Project is another example of the commitment of the University of Greenwich to poverty reduction and economic development in Africa.”

 

The Tabeisa Project consortium aims to tackle poverty among communities in sub-Saharan Africa by supporting small business entrepreneurs and social enterprise projects. Since 1994, Tabeisa has supported over 1000 commercial start-up enterprises, developed more than 200 social enterprises, created over 2000 new jobs, and has also distributed 150,000 AIDS awareness packs. One of its high-profile successes has been a tie-up with a leading fashion store to sell ethically-produced clothing made by women’s collectives in Ghana, and the concept of the successful initial promotion ‘Design4Life Ghana’ is now being extended to ‘Design4Life Africa’.

 

The Tabeisa initiative has attracted £11M funding from the European Union, the British government and other backers in Africa and Europe. Bill Rammell MP, the Minister of State for Higher Education, who has visited Tabeisa project activities in Africa, says “I wish to congratulate the University of Greenwich, and all the partners involved in the Tabeisa project, on winning this prestigious prize. I visited the Tabeisa project in Ghana and was impressed by how it helps build capacity and reduce poverty in the African economy through English and African University partnerships. This project is an excellent example of government, universities, communities and young people working together to improve their future. The Department for Innovation, Universities & Skills supported this very worthwhile project through its England-Africa Partnerships programme.”

 

For more information on the Tabeisa project, contact the University’s Press Officer Nick Davison (n.a.p.davison@gre.ac.uk).

Long-Term Views of Migrant Pests

26 October 2007

Professor Robert Cheke of NRI – a specialist on migrant pests such as quelea birds, locusts and armyworms – has published a commentary on recent research examining thousand-year long data sets. The article ‘Thinking Long Term’ appeared in the Perspectives section of the journal Science on 26 October 2007 (volume 318, pp. 577–578). It discusses the implications, in relation to climate change, of analyses of the dynamics of larch budmoths in the European Alps based on tree growth rings from as far back as 1173 years ago, and of data on the Chinese migratory locust from as long ago as 707 BC. Recent analyses of these data sets have illustrated how such long series can reveal insights and improve predictions of pest outbreaks. Prof. Cheke considers the implications of these records for our understanding of the impacts of climate change, and proposes that the foresight and long-term commitment that created the records of the Chinese locusts should be applied to current data collection programmes. A summary of the article can be found here. The full text can be found here.

 

For more information about NRI’s work on migrant pests, contact Prof. Robert Cheke (R.A.Cheke@gre.ac.uk).

Tsetse Project Short-Listed for Times Higher Award

October 2007

A team led by NRI’s Reader in Veterinary Entomology, Dr Stephen Torr, has been shortlisted for the prestigious Times Higher Award for ‘Research Project of the Year’, for work on controlling tsetse fly in Africa, to reduce the fatal disease of sleeping sickness spread by these flies. Dr Torr is a leading expert in the control of tsetse flies, and for this project he teamed up with colleagues in the University of Edinburgh to find better ways of using pesticide against tsetse whilst reducing costs and limiting environmental damage. He explains the background to the research: “Sleeping sickness spread by the tsetse fly is a dreadful problem in Africa, killing 30,000 people and two million cattle every year. Although insecticide is effective for controlling the tsetse, it has not been widely used as it is too expensive for farmers and may reduce the immunity of cattle to diseases that are spread by ticks.”

 

Steve Torr discusses disease vector problems with villagers in Pangani, Tanzania © University of Greenwich

 

Dr Torr’s project found that a more focused application of a smaller amount of insecticide is actually more effective. Using a form of DNA fingerprinting, the team showed that tsetse prefer to feed on the larger and older cattle in a herd, and that they mainly feed on the legs and bellies of the cattle. “So farmers don’t need to spray the whole cow with insecticide and they don’t need to spray every cow – thus cutting pesticide costs to just £1 per cow per year,” Steve points out.

 

The project’s findings have been translated into a practical scheme, using an interactive programme – a ‘virtual entomologist’ – to help livestock farmers to plan operations against tsetse. To date, 200,000 cattle in Uganda have been treated under the new system, as part of a wider campaign to eradicate sleeping sickness, and trials have also been carried out in Ethiopia, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. The research was supported by DFID’s Animal Health and Livestock Production Programmes, and the field work involved many NGOs, government veterinary departments and community-based projects in these countries.

 

The winner of this Times Higher Award will be announced at a ceremony in London on 29 November.  Meanwhile, Dr Torr is focusing his attention on finding similar solutions for control of the biting midges (Culicoides spp.) that are vectors of the recent outbreak of bluetongue disease among ruminant livestock in eastern England.

 

For further information about this research on control of tsetse and other livestock disease vectors, contact Dr Steve Torr (S.Torr@gre.ac.uk).

Market-Oriented Agricultural Advisory Services

October 2007

On 8-9 October 2007, NRI hosted a small, but important, workshop to analyse the services needed by farmers in developing countries in order to obtain better access to markets, and to consider how those services should be funded and delivered.

 

Market stall in Afghanistan (photo Barry Pound) © University of Greenwich

 

The workshop, on Market-Oriented Agricultural Advisory Services (MOAAS), was part of a process of development of a working paper on the subject for the influential Neuchậtel Initiative – an informal group of donor agencies and academic institutions, including NRI, that are involved in agricultural development. The Neuchậtel Initiative is one of the very few international forums that focuses on agricultural extension, with the aim of developing a common understanding of current issues. MOAAS can play a key role in transforming pro-poor rural-development efforts from merely ‘helping poor farmers’ into actions for long-term growth and poverty alleviation: a subject in which NRI has particular interest and expertise.

The prime purpose of the workshop was to undertake a critical review of a draft version of the working paper, to identify any gaps in the content and to provide additional case-study material. The workshop brought together the collective expertise and experience of several NRI staff (Uli Kleih, Ruth Butterworth, Czech Conroy, Dr Rory Hillocks, Adrienne Martin and Barry Pound), and the authors of the initial draft paper – Ian Christoplos (Sweden), Elisabeth Katz (Switzerland) and Sanne Chipeta (Denmark) – plus Andreas Springer-Heinze (GTZ) and Felicity Proctor. The participants also worked on key messages for a common MOAAS framework, and agreed the next steps needed to finalize the working paper and to develop a new Neuchậtel Initiative Green Booklet on the subject.

 

The workshop, organized by Barry Pound with assistance from Caroline Troy, was very successful, and the participants expressed their appreciation of the hospitality provided by NRI’s Director Dr Guy Poulter and Director of Research & Enterprise Prof. Andrew Westby. The content of the working paper was substantially supplemented and revised, and significant progress was made in developing a new Green Booklet. These documents will now be presented to the November 2007 meeting of the Neuchậtel Initiative representatives in Montpellier, which will be attended by Barry Pound.

 

For further information on MOAAS, visit the Neuchậtel Initiative website or contact Barry Pound (B.Pound@gre.ac.uk).

 

‘Outstanding Paper Prize’ for Honeybee Research

October 2007

 

The editors of The Journal of Experimental Biology have awarded their journal’s ‘Outstanding Paper Prize for 2007’ to NRI’s Visiting Fellow in Ecological Entomology, Dr Don Reynolds, and four colleagues from Rothamsted Research for their paper entitled “Honeybees perform optimal scale-free searching flights when attempting to locate a food source”. In this research, the flight patterns of foraging honeybees searching for an artificial feeder were recorded using harmonic radar – a technique previously developed at NRI by Prof. Joe Riley and Alan Smith. Bees were ‘tagged’ with a small electronic device (a transponder) that allowed their subsequent flights to be monitored over scales of several hundred metres. The experiments showed that the bees’ flight patterns have scale-free (Lévy-flight) characteristics that constitute an optimal searching strategy for locating the feeder. This collaboration between mathematical, physical and ecological scientists is leading to better predictive models of insect flight patterns over landscape scales.

 

A honeybee forager tagged with a harmonic radar transponder Photo courtesy of Andrew Martin

For further information about NRI’s collaborative research with Rothamsted on the use of harmonic radar to study insect behaviour and ecology, contact Dr Don Reynolds (D.Reynolds@gre.ac.uk).

 

IPCC Awarded Nobel Peace Prize

October 2007

 

NRI welcomes the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), jointly with Al Gore. The Nobel Committee’s announcement notes that “Through the scientific reports it has issued over the past two decades, the IPCC has created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming”.

 

In the IPCC’s response, its Chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, said that “This is an honour that goes to all the scientists and authors who have contributed to the work of the IPCC”. NRI’s Associate Research Director (Social Sciences) and Professor of Development Anthropology, John Morton, is amongst those thus honoured, being one of the 450 Lead Authors who worked on the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, published this year, in the area of ‘Climate Change Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability’. His contribution was based on his considerable expertise in livestock and pastoralist development, with a particular interest in issues of drought management and irrigation, and his substantial field experience in Africa and South Asia.

 

Professor John Morton in the field with pastoralists in Gujarat © University of Greenwich

 

On hearing the news, Prof. Morton commented that “The award of the Nobel Peace Prize recognizes the importance of global climate change to all aspects of human society, including the dangers of conflict over natural resources that lie ahead if warming goes unchecked. The IPCC process has been a collective international and multi-disciplinary effort. I am very proud to have been involved in the agricultural chapter on ‘Food, Fibre and Forest Products’ [PDF 920Kb], in which we were able to review the serious potential impacts, objectively and with full recognition of how complex and locally-specific they will be.” As well as being a Lead Author on this agricultural chapter, Prof. Morton was also a Contributing Author to the chapter concerned with specific climate change impacts in ‘Africa’ [PDF 1.8Mb].

 

For more information on NRI’s activities relating to the impact of climate change, especially for small-scale agriculture in Africa, contact Prof. John Morton (J.F.Morton@gre.ac.uk).

 

32 Kebbi State Students Earn Master’s Degrees

September 2007

 

The University of Greenwich is collaborating with Kebbi State in north-western Nigeria to establish a new University there. As a key part of this, thirty-two students from Kebbi State arrived here in October 2006 to study on MSc programmes in a number of subjects, especially Natural Resource Management, Science (including Biotechnology), Computer Studies, and Engineering. Nearly a year later, they have successfully gained their Master’s degrees and are now returning home to play an important role in the academic development of the new Kebbi State University. John Linton, NRI’s Commercial Director, said “It has been a great pleasure to have the Kebbi group studying with us: they fitted in very well and adapted to the inevitable challenges of undertaking postgraduate studies in a foreign country, they worked hard, and our staff have greatly enjoyed teaching them. We are delighted with their success, which is a reflection of their effort and enthusiasm.”

 

32 Kebbi State students have gained Master’s Degrees at University of Greenwich in September 2007 © University of Greenwich

 

However, that is not the end of the story.  A third of the successful MSc graduates will be returning to Greenwich later in the autumn to study as research postgraduates (for MPhil/PhD degrees), and a further 20 students from Kebbi State will be arriving in October to start their MSc programmes with us.  As part of the collaborative arrangements, staff from NRI are also assisting with an assessment of the feasibility of establishing a vegetable oil research centre within the new University in Kebbi State.

 

For more information on MSc programmes at NRI, contact Dr Peter Burt (P.J.A.Burt@gre.ac.uk), and for information on research degrees (MPhil/PhD or MSc by Research) at NRI, contact Prof. Andrew Westby (A.Westby@gre.ac.uk).  To learn more about this collaboration with Kebbi State, and similar initiatives, please contact John Linton (J.Linton@gre.ac.uk).

 

Strengthening Capacity in Africa

May 2007

At Arusha, Tanzania, women farmers are participating in on-farm trials supported by ASARECA © University of Greenwich

 

NRI is participating in a new initiative which is designed to strengthen agricultural research capacity in sub-Saharan Africa. The programme – ‘Strengthening Capacity for Agricultural Research and Development in Africa’ (SCARDA) – is led by FARA with funding from DFID. It will be implemented in the three regions by their sub-regional organizations:

• Areas covered by the three sub-regional organizations ASARECA, CORAF/WECARD and SADC-FANR. © University of Greenwich

  in Eastern and Central Africa by ASARECA;
• in West and Central Africa by CORAF/WECARD;
• in Southern Africa by SADC-FANR.

An inaugural planning meeting was held in Accra, Ghana, earlier this year (20-21 February 2007), and scoping studies are now being undertaken to identify the capacity-strengthening priorities that will be addressed by the SCARDA programme.  The main focus of the programme is to strengthen the capacity of key organizations that can contribute to the development of stronger national agricultural research systems in the target countries.

 

NRI is supporting FARA and the three sub-regional organizations ASARECA, CORAF/WECARD and SADC-FANR during the current scoping studies, and will provide capacity-strengthening services during the three-year programme implementation period.

 

For further information on this programme and on NRI’s capabilities in capacity strengthening for agricultural research and development, contact Dr Tim Chancellor (T.C.B.Chancellor@gre.ac.uk), who is co-ordinating NRI’s inputs to SCARDA.

 

Report on Telecentre Initiatives in Rural India

January 2007

 

NRI’s Reader in Rural Livelihoods, Czech Conroy has undertaken a critical review of the role of rural telecentres as one of the means by which information and communications technology (ICT) can contribute to development objectives in rural areas. The review, carried out as part of the EU-funded pilot phase of the TeleSupport Project, discusses issues raised by previous literature on the role of telecentres, and then focuses on descriptions or case studies of nine telecentre initiatives in India. The review (available as the Project’s Working Paper 4 [pdf 253Kb]) relates these case-study experiences to general themes concerning internet-based telecentres and wider approaches to communication for development, including traditional media and other elements of ICT, such as radio and mobile phones.

 

For more information, visit the TeleSupport website or contact the TeleSupport Project Coordinator Dr Tim Chancellor (T.C.B.Chancellor@gre.ac.uk) or the review’s author Czech Conroy (M.A.Conroy@gre.ac.uk).

 

 

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