PLA Notes 45: Community-based animal healthcare

This issue has a special theme section on Community-based animal healthcare. It features ten papers looking at community-based animal health workers (CAHW) and the important role they have played, and could play in the future, in maintaining and improving livestock health in rural areas.

Drawing on the experiences of various grassroots programmes across Africa and Asia, the papers many of the factors that hinder the use of CAHWs, such the lack of recognition within governments and problems with complex disease management. The articles also detail the many advantages of CAHWs, such as unparalleled access to communities and short training periods in comparison to formally trained veterinary doctors.  

This issue also includes five general articles, as follows:

A paper introducing a new tool, the Innovation Tree, aims to help people visualise how new technologies and ideas are passed through a community.

An report on how Save the Children, a British NGO, set up a school for disabled children in Morocco.

A paper looking at sustainable development planning and observatories within local government in Manizales, Columbia (in both Spanish and English).

An article investigating the success of various participatory techniques to help inform rural people about markets.

The Tips for Trainers item provides ideas on how to encourage participants to share any misconceptions they had before attending a workshop.