Five-year grant supports programme hosted at Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies, University of Edinburgh
SEBI-Livestock will strengthen its work on livestock data insights with a $14.9 million grant from the Gates Foundation, awarded to the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Through the five-year ‘Evidence into Action’ (EnAct) grant, the programme will expand and enhance tools and processes for monitoring, data collation, modelling, insights and learning within livestock investments and for the sector as a whole.
For almost a decade, our team has collaborated with the Gates Foundation to monitor the impact of the foundation’s livestock investments.. Livestock is a key area within the foundation’s Global Growth and Opportunity’s Agricultural Development strategy, which aims to improve farmer income, enhance nutrition, and inclusively and sustainably transform agricultural systems in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
SEBI-Livestock is applying innovative data solutions to build a comprehensive picture of how the livestock sector is performing in key countries and track the contribution of the Gates Foundation’s investments towards achieving country-level livestock targets. By monitoring national livestock trends, we help provide vital context for the foundation’s investment-making decisions. To date, our programme has enabled improvements in data sharing and monitoring, working closely with 18 Gates-funded projects to measure progress against 100 standardised metrics. This data and evidence allow the Gates Foundation to monitor the delivery of products and services across their portfolio of livestock investments, supporting more efficient and confident investment decisions.
Under the new grant, we will continue to develop proactive and novel solutions to strengthen monitoring and learning. The planned expansion for 2026-2030 will cover a wider range of livestock partners and support the foundation with data and insights to underpin new investments including ambitious and large-scale investments known as ‘Big Bets’. SEBI-Livestock will also work with the foundation and its grantees on investments in emerging areas of livestock and aquaculture nutrition and pastoral markets.
“This funding allows us to advance its crucial work, building on nearly a decade of collaboration with the Gates Foundation’s Livestock programme and its grantees,” explained Dr. Karen Smyth, SEBI-Livestock Programme Director. “The SEBI-L team is unique in bringing together veterinary expertise and data science insights to tackle complex livestock data challenges and close persistent evidence gaps. We are proud to be supporting the foundation and its grantees in making data-driven decisions and investments. This will ultimately translate into more impactful livestock programmes that improve livelihoods for livestock keepers, empower women, and reduce the sector’s environmental and climate footprint,” she said.
In addition to in-house expertise, SEBI-Livestock helps mobilise collaborative solutions from a global community of experts, through hosting the Livestock Data for Decisions network (LD4D). With over 2500 members across 80 countries, LD4D has supported its members to share learnings in livestock development and jointly resolve livestock data and evidence challenges. This includes how to share data back to farmers, digital innovations that work in low-and middle-income countries, unlocking climate finance for the livestock sector, and incorporating gender considerations into livestock economic modelling.
In EnAct, SEBI-L will join forces with the Data Science Unit at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics, which applies cutting-edge data science and AI tools for social good. This collaboration will allow a strong focus on identifying and deploying innovative solutions to close livestock data and evidence gaps, increase efficiencies and reduce costs. Planned activities include using automated text mining to create datasets for evidence synthesis and using machine learning to extract hard-to-reach data, evidence and insights from publicly available datasets. A new area of work will be horizon scanning with the LD4D community to identify technological innovations that offer potential new and valuable sources of data for the livestock sector, including drones, satellite monitoring and the Internet of Things (IoT).
Professor Lisa Boden, Head of School and Dean of Veterinary Medicine, said “Hosting SEBI-Livestock strengthens our School’s global impact in veterinary science. Their rigorous, data-driven work has shaped hundreds of millions of dollars in development funding decisions. This is the kind of research excellence that defines our institution and will inspire our students to tackle livestock development challenges.”
“SEBI-Livestock conducts vital work to evidence the need for, and impact of, strategies to improve the production and welfare of livestock,” said Professor Mark Stevens, Interim Director of The Roslin Institute. “This funding will enable them to strengthen and scale their ongoing collaborative work with the Gates Foundation and the global livestock community. SEBI-Livestock tackles a critical bottleneck: making livestock data reliable, accessible, and usable so that evidence can drive better development decisions.”
About SEBI-Livestock
The Centre for Supporting Evidence-Based Interventions in Livestock (SEBI-Livestock) mobilises and improves data and evidence to help the livestock community make better investments that improve livelihoods for smallholders in low and middle-income countries. Established in 2016, SEBI-Livestock is hosted by the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies at the University of Edinburgh.