The Future of Smallholder Farming in Eastern Africa - Uganda ...

The number of cases handled by the workers was significantly influenced by the
number of refresher courses attended and also by whether the worker keeps records or not.
All other hypothesized influencing factors (business skills training, income, gender, and
distance to drug shop) were not significant.
These results indicate that the CBAHWs who kept records could handle about 98 cases
per year more than those who did not, .other things begin equal. In addition, an extra
refresher course undertaken could increase the level of activity by up to 25 more cases per
year. These findings show that continual professional development through refresher courses
and commitment to work indicated by keeping records are important factors in determining
the success of the community-based animal health workers model.
4.5 Factors determining the sustainability of the activities of CBAHWs
A logistic regression was used to analyze the effects of personal characteristics,
indicators of income, and competition on the likelihood of a CBAHW’s remaining in active
practice (equation 2). The independent variables included annual income from other
activities, distance to veterinary drug shop, years of farming experience, number of refresher
courses attended, possession of business skills as a dummy variable (dummy = 1 if trained in
business skills and 0 for none), and maintenance of practice records (dummy = 1 for keeping
records and 0 for none). Age of the CBAHW and distance to a trained veterinarian were not
included because of their high correlation with years of farming experience and distance to
veterinary drug shop respectively. The results are given in Table 10.