Soil and water conservation in Kenya: Report of a Workshop held at the Univeristy of Naibori 21- 23 September, 1977

A Workshop on Soil and Water Conservation was held at the University of Nairobi from 2l to 23 September 1977, sponsored by the Land and Farm Management Division of the Ministry of Agriculture and the Departments of Agricultural Engineering of the University and Egerton College. The objectives of this workshop were:- 1. To bring together research workers, teachers, extension officers and others who are concerned with problems of soil and water conservation, 2. To exchange technical information and discuss problems in assessing needs and in planning, implementing and evaluating conservation systems, and 3. To identify priorities for research and to seek ways to increase the effectiveness and relevance of teaching. In keeping with these objectives, a number of papers were presented at the workshop and are included in full in this report. Topics covered include, among others, experiments with various cropping systems and tillage methods to determine which patterns of land use minimise soil loss methods for reclaiming swampy or badly eroding land, studies of small experimental catchment areas, the physical and social problems involved in carrying out conservation programmes in semi-arid areas, and the Ministry of Agriculture's plans for a major soil and water conservation programme. In addition to these discussions, field trips were conducted to Machakos and Murang'a which are described in this report, and a list of recommendations was drafted which is also included

Nutrition planning and policy for African countries: summary report of a seminar held 2-19 June, 1976

This paper is the summary report of a seminar which was held at the Institute for Development Studies from 2 to 19 June 1976, The seminar was sponsored by USAID through a contract to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Participants were government officers and employees of nongovernment agencies from ten English-speaking African countries whose responsibilities are clearly related to nutrition planning and policy making. The report includes short summaries of the sessions conducted by the seminar staff members. Some of these sessions were devoted to the salient nutritional problems of Africa and their complex causes, to sociocultural factors that influence the condition and its alleviation, and to the basic economic considerations relating to the cause and control of malnutrition and food shortages. However, much more time was devoted to planning and policy relating to nutrition. The participants formed working groups and prepared short reports on nutrition planning for Tanzania's Ujamaa villages, on nutrition activities and goals in Kenya, on increased wheat consumption and the trend toward bottle feeding in West Africa, and on nutrition actitivities in the Sudan. The working group reports are also included in this paper