Netherlands East Africa Dairy Partnership (NEADAP)

The Netherlands East African Dairy Partnership (NEADAP) is a partnership between Agriterra, SNV, Solidaridad and Wageningen University & Research (WUR). The goal of NEADAP is to provide a forum for the sharing of information and expertise and promote development of the East African dairy production value chain.

The NEADAP partnership organised exchange visits, learning, and documentation around animal fodder, milk quality, and inclusive dairy business. In the second phase, 2021 - 2023, the partnership focuses on testing and adaptive scaling of these and other proven approaches and technologies in Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi.

NEADAP also collaborates with international dairy actors such as the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), and non-governmental dairy organizations (NGOs). The network built around NEADAP is critical to the shared goal of making dairy a valuable component of the transition to sustainable food systems.

The project result areas are to:

• Provide affordable, safe and nutritious diets for vulnerable groups of consumers, including young children and pregnant and breastfeeding mothers

• Develop value chains that generate rural incomes and improved livelihoods, driven by shared interest and realizing assured quality, high efficiency and fair shares of margins

• Develop dairy farming systems that sustain the agroecological base, which requires farming systems that are productive, profitable, resource-efficient, ecologically sustainable and climate-smart.

Expected outcomes:

1. Effective extension services to smallholder farmers.

2. Focus on forage, by promoting forage seed availability and develop dairy extension messages on the economics of quality forage and strengthening the forage seed market.

3. Provision of practical solutions to improve manure management.

4. Better diets for dairy cows, through promotion of use Rumen 8 software in feed formulation.

5. To encourage adoption of the maize train technology “as a service” by farmers in utilizing it to harvest quality maize fodder crop as silage.

6. To provide yoghurt technology and business development training for wealth generation by supporting social business model of local yoghurt production.

7. To inform on policy dialogues through the development of dairy sustainability assessment tool.