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I am Eliud Abucheli Birachi. I was born in Kenya. I did my PhD at Christian Albrechts University, Kiel, Germany where I studied Agribusiness, did MSc in Economics and Management in Wageningen University, Netherlands, and a Bachelor of Agribusiness Management at Egerton University in Kenya. I worked previously as a lecturer at Egerton University till 2008 and later joined CIAT in Rwanda in 2008, as Market Value Chains Specialist. Since 2013, I am working at the Regional Africa office of CIAT in Nairobi.
On behalf of CIAT I work as scientist and principal investigator for Africa RISING project in Ethiopia particularly on the markets and value chains research. I have been serving in this role since March 2013. In this position, I support value chain research across all the sites and across different crop and livestock enterprises, as well as enhancing the research capacity of implementing partners. From this work we would like to ensure that producers are well linked to sustainable markets for their products, market opportunities are created for producers and other actors, and that information about them is available to all as well as market information drives farmer technology uptake.
It is interesting to work in Africa RISING project due to its unique nature of Integration and partnerships and a focus on outcomes. However, it has a challenging part as well which is dealing with multiple partners to build a cohesive team focused on farmer needs. In order to address this challenge I believe promoting openness and having a regular communications will help.
So far I have learned that it is possible to deliver results in a shorter time using multi-disciplinary approach even though it initially takes longer to build the teams. And I found that there are interesting perspectives on how marketers interact with farmers which we are soon going to document from data that has been collected.