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

Note: Values with the same alphabetical and numerical superscripts in a row are
significantly different at p = 0.05 and p = 0.10 respectively between groups using
Kruskal-Wallis test; n = 161 for goats and 101 for cattle; s.d = standard deviation.
* Birth ratios are averages for the years 1998/99, 1999/2000, 2000/01.
The case for goats was no different. The number of births recorded per doe was also
lower among livestock keepers who used veterinary personnel compared with that of
livestock keepers who used CBAHWs (p = .10). The BI between these two groups of
livestock keepers was, however, not significantly different (p = 0.10).
Based on this comparison, CBAHWs appeared to provide services that enhanced the
fertility of their clients’ herds, probably because they are trained to handle common diseases
and ailments in their area of operation and because of their proximity to their clients. Thus,
they appear to have had a positive impact on herd productivity.
Livestock keepers who used a combination of health delivery channels had the highest
birth ratio in goats, which was significantly different from that of veterinary personnel and
veterinary drug shop users. In the year 2000 the proportion of livestock keepers that made
contact with CBAHWs was 76.4 percent (n = 182). Fifty-three of them used CBAHWs
exclusively. This implies that all the livestock keepers who used a combination of services
(together with those who could not be categorized) used the services of CBAHWs, in
addition to other channels.
6.0 PRIORITIES FOR PARTICULAR ANIMAL HEALTH SERVICES
Understanding the health service priorities of livestock keepers and the capabilities of
CBAHWs should reveal ways of strengthening animal health service delivery through
CBAHWs. Therefore, the CBAHWs who were assumed to be knowledgeable livestock
keepers were asked to rank 10 health and production services in order of priority. This
approach was used to minimize divergent priorities arising from differences in level of
knowledge on livestock health among livestock keepers. The responses are given in Table 21.
These were the services that had been mentioned as being important during the exploratory
stage of this study. CBAHWs gave higher priority to preventive than to curative measures in
management of livestock health, and these priorities are in accordance with newer veterinary
practice philosophy.
The priorities mentioned by CBAHWs, however, seemed to downgrade those aspects of
veterinary medicine that provide collective rather than private benefits. As shown in Table
21, on average, CBAHWs mentioned tick control as top priority, followed by preventative
(prophylactic) and curative management of killer diseases and pasture improvement. These
services offer private gains to livestock keepers undertaking them. Tsetse control and
immunization against epizootic diseases have a strong public gain component and received
lower ranking. Services with a private gain component that do not pose a great risk of death
to livestock also received a lower ranking.