International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI)

The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) works with partners worldwide to enhance the roles that livestock play in food security and poverty alleviation, principally in Africa and Asia. The outcomes of these research partnerships help people in developing countries keep their farm animals alive and productive, increase their livestock and farm productivity in sustainable ways, find profitable markets for their animal products, and reduce the risk of livestock-related human diseases.

ILRI is a non-profit institution with a staff of about 700 and an annual operating budget of about US$80 million. ILRI is an international research institute co-hosted by Kenya and Ethiopia. It works through a network of regional and country offices and projects in East, South and Southeast Asia, Central, East, Southern and West Africa.

In the developing world, livestock are the fastest-growing part of agriculture. Due to population growth and other drivers of change, many of the developing world’s livestock systems are transforming as fast as they are growing. Livestock science helps the world’s almost one billion people depending on small-scale livestock keeping to make better and more sustainable use of the big changes and new trends.

To increase global food supplies by as much as 70 per cent in the next 40 years without depleting natural resources, options are needed to support the world’s vast array of smallholder food producers, particularly small-scale ‘mixed’ crop-and-livestock farmers, who are the mainstay of the world’s food production and are likely to remain so for generations to come, as well as livestock herders, who move their animals periodically to find new pastures across rangelands covering one-third of the earth’s ice-free surface, and who are among the world’s most vulnerable people.

ILRI is organized in the following major research programs:

• Animal and Human Health
• Feed and Forage Development
• Livestock Genetics (LiveGene)
• Policies, Institutions and Livelihoods
• Sustainable Livestock Systems
• Impact at Scale
• Biosciences eastern and central Africa (BecA)-ILRI Hub

Cross-cutting gender, research methods, communications, knowledge management, capacity development and partnership programs support these research programs.

ILRI leads the CGIAR Research Program on Livestock, ILRI leads one flagship and co-leads another of the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health, and ILRI contributes substantially to the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security and several other CGIAR research programs and platforms. Staff members work in integrated programs that develop and deliver science-based practices, provide scientific evidence for decision-making and develop capacities of livestock-sector stakeholders.

Feature image: A cattle keeper in Laos gives her cows salt (photo credit: ILRI/Stevie Mann).