Connecting Agropastoral Food Culture Research to Livestock Commercialisation Policy, 2021-2023

This research project aimed to define a new research agenda for connecting policy on livestock sector development to research on agropastoralist food cultures. The project brought together a group of relevant stakeholders - policy makers and implementers, researchers, development actors, and local community representatives - from East and West Africa. Researchers performed a rapid literature review on policy and cultural aspects relevant to milk production and consumption in the study locations, policy actors explained their activities and some community members took part in participatory photography. The group reviewed the data in a seminar based on the local ‘Baraza’ deliberation format. The data set comprises: A transcript of an interview with a policy actor from Baringo county Kenya, on the dairy value chain and the meaning of milk, in November 2021. A transcript of an interview with elders of the Arror community on rituals that use milk, in November 2021. Transcripts of a set of interviews with milk value chain actors in Ghana in November 2021. Transcripts of two focus groups held in November and December 2021 where participants from the Arror and Ilchamus ethnic groups who had taken part in a participatory photography process explain their photographs and the issues they illustrated to do with milk and culture in their communities. These transcripts are accompanied by the consent form used in the photography exercise. A report from a baraza meeting held in Baringo county, Kenya, where photographers displayed their photographs and explained them, and used these to open dialogue with policy actors at county level, in April 2022. A literature review on cultures of milk in Northern Ghana, associated with the Fulani ethnic group, and Baringo county, Kenya, associated with the Arror and Ilchamus ethnic groups, and also on policies relevant to the dairy sector, and on the state of milk markets, in Ghana and Kenya. The aim of the data collection was to provide material which provided an entry point to understanding the perspectives of each actor group, that each of the stakeholders could react to in a Baraza in order to co-create meaning about the subject matter. The other aim of the data set is to provide the researchers with material they can use to propose the role of culture in contemporary dairy markets, and policy to do with these, in the study regions.