Summary

In most developing countries, veterinary services have never targeted poor livestock owners. Historically, the prevailing wisdom was that poor people did not keep livestock or kept such small numbers that the provision of animal healthcare was uneconomic. This thinking has now been revised and livestock keepers are now seen as one of the largest subsets of global poor with an estimated one third of poor people rearing livestock.

There is now a desire by aid organizations to identify projects that have a real impact on poor people. It is widely thought that one of the best means of increasing food and livelihood security is through improvements to animal healthcare. However major hurdles still exist that prevent the introduction of relevant programmes that target poor people.

Documents

	Project Summary
	Livestock and the Poor: Issues in poverty-focused livestock development.
	The Livestock and Poverty Assessment Methodology: A toolkit for practitioners
	The Delivery of Veterinary Services to the Poor: Preliminary findings from Kenya

These include the following:

• Identifying poor families who keep livestock is difficult.
• There is a lack of information regarding the animal healthcare needs of the poor.
• Livestock share-rearing arrangements, an important form of social capital, have not been studied in a systematic manner.
• Methodologies to assess the impact of animal healthcare projects on poverty reduction are poorly developed. Many participatory techniques are either inappropriate to livestock development or biased in their assumptions having been developed for better off and better educated farmers.
  
  

Key initial findings from the fieldwork in Kenya are as follows:

• Poor livestock keepers are sophisticated consumers of livestock services.
• Needs regarding the quality and standard of services varied according to the gender of the respondent. Indeed, the influence of gender on consumer behaviour appears to be more important than the production system or prevailing environmental conditions.
• Livestock are just one part of a diverse livelihood portfolio that the poor pursue.
• Livestock are proportionally more important for the poor at the bottom of the spectrum than for those at the top.
• Livestock share-rearing arrangements are an important form of social capital. However, the nature of these relationships is changing. The need to participate in the formal market economy and generate cash for food and school fees is limiting the role of livestock in non-market transactions and relationships of mutual assistance. This means that the ability of the poor to gain access to this form of social capital is decreasing.