Towards making a difference through partnership and knowledge exchange in smallholder dairy systems

Milk production has the potential to substantially contribute to sustainable household income, food and nutritional security. However, acute staff shortages and inadequate skills within the sector have been major challenges. Over the last five years Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC) has been in a partnership with two universities: Mzuzu University, and Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources, and the Department of Animal Health and Livestock Development to contribute to the development of the dairy sector in Malawi. This work has centred on three capacity building projects titled: Sustainable Farming Systems, Optimising Smallholder Dairying, and Dairy Diploma Programme. The projects activities involved training farmers, extension workers, development managers, researchers, trainers and graduate students (MSc, MPhil, PhD, and Postdoctoral) and the integration of knowledge transfer with graduate training in support of sustainable smallholder dairy development in Malawi. Volunteer farmers were trained as lead farmers for peer knowledge exchange. This paper reports the experiences of the five-year partnership between institutions in Malawi and Scotland on strengthening smallholder dairy systems. In order to better understand the institutions’ and individual actors’ experiences and lessons from the collaborative projects, a survey of 30 key actors was undertaken in March/April 2013. This paper is based on the results of the survey. In Malawi dairy farming has been identified as its flag-ship industry. Through this initiative, a practical diploma course in dairy science has been established in Malawi and a flexible programme for life-long learning is envisaged in the future.