Closing system-wide yield gaps to increase food production and mitigate GHGs among mixed crop-livestock smallholders in Sub-Saharan Africa.

In this study we estimate yield gaps for mixed crop-livestock smallholder farmers in seven Sub-Saharan African sites covering six countries (Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia, Senegal and Burkina Faso). We also assess their potential to increase food production and reduce the GHG emission intensity of their products, as a result of closing these yield gaps. We use stochastic frontier analysis to construct separate production frontiers for each site, based on 2012 survey data prepared by the International Livestock Research Institute for the Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security program. Instead of relying on theoretically optimal yields-a common approach in yield gap assessments-our yield gaps are based on observed differences in technical efficiency among farms within each site. Sizeable yield gaps were estimated to be present in all of the sites. Expressed as potential percentage increases in outputs, the average site-based yield gaps ranged from 28 to 167% for livestock products and from 16 to 209% for crop products. The emission intensities of both livestock and crop products registered substantial falls as a consequence of closing yield gaps. The relationships between farm attributes and technical efficiency were also assessed to help inform policy makers about where best to target capacity building efforts. We found a strong and statistically significant relationship between market participation and performance across most sites. We also identified an efficiency dividend associated with the closer integration of crop and livestock enterprises. Overall, this study reveals that there are large yield gaps and that substantial benefits for food production and environmental performance are possible through closing these gaps, without the need for new technology.

Diagnóstico de situación de la docencia y el ambiente educativo existente en la Escuela de Medicina Universidad de Chile 2013, según opinión de sus alumnos de 2º a 7º año 2013 / Diagnosis of the situation of teaching and the existing educational environment University Medical School Chile 2013, in the opinion of their students of 2nd to 7th 2013

The Faculty of Medicine of the University of Chile has developed a program, where students play an important role colaborating with their teachers in research. Traditionally it has been related to basic and/or clinical research. We present here an innovation: the participation of students in educational research. Medical students from different learning stages participated actively planning and performing this research, and they were indeed crucial for its success. The study shown here, is intended to favour the development of a “Continous Joint Educational Research Program”, which main goal would be to identify eventual teaching problems in order to develop prompt and adecuate solutions to continously improve the quality of medical education. The diagnosis made by the students’ opinions is only the first step of this project. Teachers’ opinions need to be considered also in a second stage. Learning outcome’s evaluation was identified by medical students as being one of the most problematic areas. A great number of them confess “traumatic experiences” in this field, some of which are described here as a mean of making teachers aware of the problem, leading them to seek for teaching and evaluation methodologies capacitation.