Fodder shrubs provide great potential for increasing the income of smallholder dairy farmers. Following successful on-station and on-farm trials and considerable farmer-to-farmer dissemination in Embu District, Kenya, a project was initiated to introduce fodder shrubs to farmers across seven districts. Over a two-year period, a dissemination facilitator working through field-based partners assisted 150 farmer groups comprising 2600 farmers to establish 250 nurseries. Farmers planted an average of about 400 shrubs each. The experience has confirmed that successful scaling up requires much more than transferring seed and knowledge about a new practice; it involves building partnerships with a range of stakeholders, ensuring the appropriateness of the practice and farmers' interest in it, assisting local communities to be effective in mobilising local and external resources, and ensuring the effective participation of farmer groups and other stakeholders in testing, disseminating, monitoring, and evaluating the practice.

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is a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of the District of Columbia. During her career, Dr. Ososanya has worked for private industry as a circuit development engineer and as a software engineer, in addition to her academic activities. She received her education in the United Kingdom, where she achieved her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Bradford in 1985. She was also a Visiting Professor at Michigan Technological University for five years, and a faculty member at Tennessee Technological University for 7 years prior to arriving at the University of the District of Columbia in the Fall of 2001. Dr. Ososanya is interested in new applications for VLSI, MEMS, parallel processing, and pipeline architecture. In recent years, she has worked with colleagues to apply these technologies to such environmental problems as watershed monitoring and management, and Telemetry applications.

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