EADD II - East Africa Dairy Development Phase II

Management:

The project has recruited all required technical and administrative personnel, a process which took between March and June of 2014. Currently, recruitment of additional technical staff including Gender Advisor, Production advisor and Resource Mobilization Manager, is underway to enhance facilitation role of the project in key strategic areas such as gender mainstreaming, production, and resource mobilization.

Program:

The process of site selection and their feasibility has been completed, with all new sites in Tanzania selected and some new sites in Uganda selected. The project has identified and validated key actors in all major intervention areas, and conducted a preliminary exercise which led to a feasibility study resulting in identification of a total of 10 and 12 viable sites for hub establishment, for Tanzania and Uganda, respectively.

Various stakeholder meetings have been conducted, with the purpose of targeting county governments to establish working linkages. These meetings were integral and provided a platform for information dissemination and more fundamentally influence the development of dairy strategies that will be key to farmer and hub sustainability. EADD II is encouraged by active and increasing support and commitment of local government agencies in many project intervention regions who allocated their resources in supporting EADD initiatives. As an example, local government agencies aligned their technical staff such as livestock officers/extension officers with EADD team, and in the case of Tanzania, private companies such as ASAS Dairies and NJOLIFA, a farmer association supported pre-feasibility study by providing their own staff to support the process. In Kenya, the Kenya Dairy Farmers Federation (KDFF), which is an apex body of POs, vaccinated 1,078 dairy animals between January and Sept 2014 in collaboration with the producer organizations, and also developed Real time software for East Coast Fever (ECF) vaccination programs.

The project concluded a staff gender assessment which was geared to know the staff capacity on gender issues and how to integrate them in project activities; this was further followed by an introductory gender training to all EADD II staff in Tanzania and Uganda. Drafting key project documents including Gender, Production and MLE strategies has been completed in 2014.