 My name is Julius Kidinji. I work for International Livestock Research Institute as a research assistant. I support dairy development. I've been working on an accelerated variety and development program whereby I've been coordinating research, meaning dairy. We've worked in western Kenya, which is more of the pre-commercial dairy areas. We've been doing work around improved forages of brick areas, which we've been taking to farmers. One of the things that we realized especially for our female smallholder farmers is around the conservation of brick areas. The most available technology of conservation has been box-belling, which is quite involving in terms of labour. It will require the woman to compress the grass, which is quite tasking. One of the things that we worked on is an improved box-beller, which doesn't require a lot of effort. It's a lever-beller and the women are able to build the grass easily. We promoted this technology across different counties and the women were able to build grass just like the male counterpart and also participate in the market. We were able to look for alternative ways in which we could work with women to participate in the fodder value chain. One of the ways that we've been able to work with the women is allowing the women to participate in the dairy value chain through leasing of land whereby the women are able to lease land, they are able to grow improved forages and from growing the improved forages they are able to generate income. Now from this income the women have been encouraged to take part in dairy by buying cows, which now they take as their own and from those cows they've been able to derive income from dairy. Also the other thing that we've been able to do with the women from that is that we are able to target our trainings. One of the things that we did is that we realized that women play an important role around milking and we targeted our trainings to have an audience that purely is the one that is in charge of milking. So what we've been able to do is the trainings around mastitis, we've been able to purely target the women and through that we've been able to reduce the cases of mastitis infection in our areas. The other things that we've also been able to do is around breeding work, we rolled out a campaign of mass insemination and from our previous studies is that we realized women are the primary caregivers of the cows and working with the women training the women on heat detection we've been able to improve our conception rates and we've been able to get more conceptions out of working with women as the ones who are detecting heat and also the ones who are contacting the rates for breeding.