Supporting livestock-centred livelihoods: what can NGOs do?

As donors increasingly favour direct budget support to deliver aid programmes, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have an important role to play. They not only support grassroots innovations in the livestock sector, but can also use these lessons to influence national policies.

NGOs can support governments and donors to developstrategies that combine relief and development objectives. For example, NGOscan identify how relief interventions following a crisis can undermine thesustainability of longer-term development programmes. Oxfam’s work in Turkanadistrict, northern Kenya, is seeking new ways to integrate relief anddevelopment. The long-term development objective is to strengthen theresilience of livelihoods, but Oxfam is including contingency plans to copewith sudden shocks, such as drought.

Livestock keepers living in areas with poorly developed marketsare often unable to access technical advice. In Kenya in the 1980s and 1990s, arange of international NGOs developed a core group of community animal healthworkers to address the gap in veterinary services. By training local people todeliver some basic treatments, they successfully initiated a small-scale servicethat focused on rural livestock keepers excluded from mainstream support.

While these practical interventions frequently improve thehealth and management of livestock, it is just as important to createfavourable policies so that these schemes can thrive. NGOs, with their intimateknowledge of rural issues, are well placed to represent ‘voiceless’ livestockkeepers in policymaking decisions. For instance, in Tanzania, in the early2000s, international and national NGOs played a key role during national policyand legislative review meetings convened by the Ministry of Water and LivestockDevelopment. This led to the government broadening the range of people andorganisations that could deliver primary veterinary services.