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

CBAHWs were the most utilized channel, whereas private para-veterinarians were the
least used. It appeared that the public veterinary staff were acting in their private capacity and
charging lower fees than the private practitioners. It was difficult to compare the charges
imposed by these health delivery channels, however, because of differences in the nature of
the cases they handled. Otieno-Oruko, Upton, and Mcleod (2000) noted that public veterinary
personnel could be using government facilities to engage in private practice (popularly
known as semi-private practice) and thus constraining the development of private veterinary
practice.
Each respondent was asked to give the most preferred health delivery channel based on
a number of parameters, particularly cost, effectiveness, availability, and reliability. The
findings are summarized in Table 15.
Table 15 -- Ranking of the health delivery channels by livestock keepers
Animal health delivery channel
% of respondents mentioning the
channel as the most preferred
CBAHWs 40
Public veterinary services 34
Drug shops 21
Private veterinary services 1
Ethnoveterinary 1
Note: Not all percentages add up to 100 because of nonresponses in some cases.
Source: Survey data, 2001.
Table 15 shows that CBAHWs was the most preferred channel. About 44 percent (n =
171) of the respondents indicated that their most preferred channel was not the most utilized
channel. The main reasons given were that the most preferred channel was either not readily
available (75 percent, n = 76) or it was expensive (24 percent).
Table 16 gives the main ailments encountered by the livestock keepers and the type of
health delivery channel used to manage these ailments for the three years prior to the survey.
The main ailments were defined as those for which a case was likely to be encountered on a
monthly basis in any livestock type and for which preventive measure had to be taken to
avoid recurrence. Trypanosomiasis and tick-borne diseases were the most reported diseases.
These are vector-transmitted diseases, infecting both domestic and wild animals. The
presence of wild animals in the settled areas could not be ruled out as contributing to high
incidences of these diseases. GIT parasites, infecting mainly the young stock and small
ruminants, were also common. CBAHWs were the delivery channel used most often for all
categories of diseases in this area.