Livestock Services and the Poor: A global initiative - IFAD

Focus on Key Issues
CHAPTER 4: RECOMMENDED ACTIONS
The organization and empowerment of the poor and encouragement for their
involvement in policy debates on service delivery represent one proposed
avenue to follow up on this review. Some of the issues emerging from this
review that need to be addressed are summarized in Table 4.1, but others
could be added. This policy agenda should be pursued through an effort to
establish a more potent advocacy capability at the country level in order to
initiate a public discussion. A specific avenue would be the preparation of
policy notes that articulate the needs of the poor, including poor livestock
keepers, and that could easily be accommodated in the IFAD Strategy for Rural
Poverty Reduction process or in other policy forums.
Apart from cross-cutting issues, each production system and related
community face issues proper to that system. Table 4.2 provides examples of
the issues that are most likely to be of concern to livestock keepers in various
settings. The enhancement of the poor livestock keeper’s own organizations
and the identification of the priorities among the livestock keeper’s needs will
ensure that these concerns are appropriately addressed.
This document describes a number of practices that represent new trends
in poverty-focused livestock development. The impact of many of these
new approaches in terms of poverty reduction is still difficult to gauge
because the proper tools for impact assessment and monitoring are lacking.
Rarely do projects described in the literature involve attempts to define and
measure indicators of the impact of the projects on equity. Project designs have
not provided for the collection of baseline data or the use of monitoring systems.
This makes learning from experience difficult. Guidelines on ways to establish
and measure poverty-focused monitoring indicators need to be developed. One
might build on the work already carried out in LID (1999), for example.
An effort is needed to expand significantly the learning gained from
ongoing experiences, both successful and unsuccessful. The lessons learned
through livestock programmes are generally not shared, but rather they are
confined to the agencies involved and are often lost at the end of projects
and programmes. Formal communication pathways to distribute projectrelated
information and experiences among institutions are not available.
Moreover, recommendations on best practices are rare, and the preparation
of a consistent framework to guide practitioners in project design and delivery
across the livestock sector is thereby rendered very difficult.
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