Pilot Application of GeOC4SLiM to Identify Potential Areas for Outscaling Community-based Breeding Programs (CBBP) for Small Ruminants in Ethiopia and Kenya

Abstract

This is the research report on pilot application of GeOC4SLiM to target Community-based Breeding Programs (CBBP) for Small Ruminants in socio-ecological contexts in Ethiopia and Kenya, in the face of given limited resources and inherent diversity of socio-ecological context. We focused on two use cases: (1) Targeting options in context: given a defined socio-ecological context, tool users can know about what promising CBBP options from current available CBBP data encoded in the tool, and (2) Targeting relevant socio-ecological context for outscaling promising CBBP options: given a set of promising CBBP options in a limited number of project sites, tool users can know where efforts should be focused by managing or coping with what potential drivers. The visualization of relevant extrapolation/recommendation domain would support the out-scaling of site-specific successful SLiM options. We discussed innovative features and limitations of the tool, and recommend an version-by-version approach that can accommodate both on-going tool development meeting needs and new data availability, meanwhile encourage tool uses with informed limitation and cautions.