The work of the Livestock Livelihoods & Agri-Food Systems (LLAFs) flagship aims to maximize livestock-mediated livelihoods and resilience to risk among smallholder and pastoral producers and their communities, whilst enhancing availability and access to animal- source food for rural and urban consumers.

This flagship focuses on enhancing the benefits of livestock in both market and livelihood systems. Socio-economic approaches will be applied to characterize these systems as they exist currently and are likely to evolve into the future, and identify priorities accordingly. The flagship serves to combine and test various technical and institutional innovations as integrated interventions to develop inclusive and sustainable livestock value chains and strengthen resilience of livelihoods that rely on livestock, building on the momentum achieved in the phase 1 value chains and developing new work on livestock livelihoods in selected sites. Particular emphasis is also given to policy analysis to create enabling environments in the program’s priority countries and to advance the gender research agenda.

The Livestock Livelihoods and Agri-Food Systems flagship’s objectives are:

• Set research priorities for the Livestock CRP, within the context of a dynamic, global livestock sector and conduct policy analysis to guide inclusive and sustainable investments by both public and private actors.
• Improve livestock technology development and adoption by ensuring that gender-based analysis informs research priority setting across the CRP and that delivery and scaling are equitable.
• Identify, test and facilitate livestock-mediated pathways to improve nutrition in rural households and their communities.
• Improve the livelihoods of smallholder livestock keepers and their ability to cope with shocks, through integrated technologies and institutional innovations.
• Improve the performance of animal-source food systems and promote pro-poor livestock development through institutional innovation and policy advocacy.

The flagship:

• Delivers outcomes that address rural livelihoods, nutrition, gender and livestock agri-food system performance, with livestock-mediated livelihoods and well-being as its core aim.
• Provides the integrative mechanisms for technologies and strategies from the CRP’s technology and environment flagships to be piloted and implemented among target livestock keepers and communities.
• Ensures that priority setting and gender are mainstreamed across the CRP.
• Leads CRP policy analysis as basis for advocacy to promote livestock growth opportunities for the poor.
• Identifies evidence-based best practices to facilitate scaling by partners of innovations addressing the unique opportunities afforded by livestock systems.
• Provides key linkages to the PIM CRP for foresight, gender, market development and scaling, and to A4NH CRP for human nutrition and food safety

The flagship’s work on systems analysis for priority setting and investment are intended to ensure that the CRP’s research remains demand driven, directed towards interventions that optimize impact and minimize trade-offs among objectives, and to facilitate investment for scaling up by partners and decision- makers to achieve impact at scale.

Another stream of work is focused on streamlining gender and social equity, to ensure that interventions are based on accurately identified needs, preferences and potential of women, youth and other marginalized groups.

These two streams of work, together, contribute to achieving gender-equitable control of assets and resources and improved capacity of women and youth to participate in decision-making.