 My name is André Fanroen, I'm working with the Cresat in Zimbabwe in Buluwe. We focus a lot of our work on crop livestock interactions and to try and facilitate great to use of technologies with small scale farmers. The approach we're using is that of innovation platforms or innovation systems where our working hypothesis is that farmers will only invest in increased or improved technologies when they become part and parcel of an effective and efficient marketing system. So the idea behind it is to develop the markets and through that create the pool for increased investments. So through the innovation platforms we bring in the value chain players, let them or allow them to express their challenges and the opportunities that they bring to the system and through that channel articulate the points of interventions which farmers then may adopt. We found that quite often because this information comes from more credible resources, if the Abertwa owner tells you he will pay more for livestock it's got a much stronger message than a scientist having in that. So we're using by developing the markets as a pool for increased technology investment or greater investment in farming strategies and we've had a number of successes in that in Namibia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. It's a difficult process, it takes a lot of time and investment from the researchers point of view, from the project's point of view to get people together but in the long term it's got some really good spin-offs. First of all we're using this process to identify the real challenges, not our challenges as scientists but what the farmers are really struggling with and what the value chain are struggling with, again the only people that really put money into the system is the consumer and what we're trying to do using the value chain approach is to reduce the transaction cost so that more money can flow from the consumer to the farmer but the farmer needs to come to the party in producing the quality and the numbers that the consumer want So using the sort of innovation approach we enter in an iterative process of changing, adapting, adopting methodologies, technologies, testing market systems to try and increase the overall efficiency of the production to market process. It sounds like a very different type of research than you can sometimes come across in CG centres. Yeah it's not your run of the mill science but yes personally I think this is the types of stuff that we should engage in more and more often because there are some brilliant technologies and strategies available but to put it within the context of the farmer where it makes sense to the farmer is often the great challenge and I see huge scope for the CG to get involved in these sort of issues How do we get real technology to farmers? How do we put it in the context of the farmer so the farmer can see the real benefits and experience those benefits and I think these innovation systems which we're beginning to grapple with provide us that opportunity or that platform to introduce these types of technologies.