The University of Florida, Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (IFAS)has announced $8.7 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation over five years to fund research aimed at tackling global hunger in Ethiopia and Burkina Faso. Adegbola Adesogan, director of the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Livestock Systems at the University of Florida leads research on providing feeds for dairy cows in Ethiopia, and sheep and goats in Burkina Faso.
Another component of the research in Ethiopia will focus on helping children under the age of 2 to avoid chronic gut inflammation by limiting exposure to chicken droppings. The inflammation, known as environmental enteric dysfunction (EED), likely causes chronic malnutrition and stunting. Approximately 40 percent of all children under 5 in Ethiopia suffer from malnutrition and stunting.
This project will be carried out by the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Livestock Systems in collaboration with multiple partners from Ethiopia, Burkina Faso and the U.S. For the feed research, partners include: the International Livestock Research Institute, the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research, University of California-Davis, Hawassa University, Ethiopia, ACDI/VOCA and Environmental Institute for Agricultural Research ( Institute of the Environment and Agriculture Research), Burkina Faso. For the EED research, partners include Haramaya University in Ethiopia, Ohio State University and Washington University in St. Louis.
In 2015, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) awarded UF/IFAS a $49 million, five-year cooperative agreement to establish the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Livestock Systems. The grant supports USAID’s agricultural research and capacity building work under Feed the Future, the U.S. Government’s global hunger and food security initiative.
The U.S. Agency for International Development administers the U.S. foreign assistance program providing economic and humanitarian assistance in more than 80 countries worldwide.
