Featured Collaborator: Fred Kabi

Meet Fred Kabi, our first-ever featured Collaborator.

We think Fred is special. A senior lecturer and researcher at Makerere University in Uganda, Fred has successfully collaborated with numerous development agencies, universities, and fellow scientists. To date, his partnerships span the United Nations World Food Program, Heifer International, the World Bank, Norway's Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD), and the University of Copenhagen, among others.

It's not just his participatory approach, record of collaboration with university, research, and industry, and general enthusiasm that we think makes Fred unique: It is the fact that he works tirelessly to address the agricultural development challenges of the nation he calls home, Uganda. There, agricultural output can be an issue of life or death, the difference between health and the chance at a better life or vicious cycles of poverty and hunger. In 2005, 75.6% of Ugandans lived on less than $2 per day and in 2006 Uganda's child malnutrition was nearly 39%. To combat pervasive hunger and to improve livelihoods for the most vulnerable farmers, increased animal protein production is needed. Until now, most farmers have attempted to meet this need through dairy animals while ignoring beef. Dairy farmers often think bulls are expensive to raise and would require feed intended for milk-producing cows. They sell bull calves cheaply or destroy them for pet food and allocate scarce feed resources to heifers. The result: Uganda is deprived of beef and farmers lose potential income available where they to allow bull calves to grow to slaughter-weight. Producing beef alongside milk can help to solve Uganda's protein needs; this is the challenge Fred's work seeks to address. This challenge is particularly significant given Uganda's population grows at a massive 3.2% per year (the US's growth rate is 0.9%). A solution lies in modifying locally available feed resources for the inexpensive growth of bull calves. The "Milk Booster" Fred developed, using locally-produced molasses, works toward this goal. To date, Fred has been unable to produce and market this important booster on a large scale. The Global Knowledge Initiative is working with Fred as a LINK Challenger to raise awareness of his exciting work and help him identify potential collaborators who might have the resources and knowledge necessary to help Fred overcome this obstacle.

With his submission of a Request for Engagement through the Global Knowledge Initiative's LINK program in East Africa, Fred became one of our most active LINK Challengers. He has enthusiastically participated in a number of GKI-sponsored forums that seek to spur collaborative innovation, including the GKI-facilitated "From the Lab to the Field: An International Discussion of Affordable Technologies." This event was co-hosted by GKI, Pennsylvania State University, the Uganda National Council on Science and Technology, and the Uganda Management Institute on April 22, 2011.

Learn more about Fred and the type of resources he seeks through partnership on our Challengers page.

Contributor: Christina Golubski

Photo: Amanda Rose