by Mary Wykstra

The first greeting when I arrived from the US to the Nairobi base house was from my dogs – Ginger and Bahati were extremely happy to have me home. They were followed by three young men and a lady from the Netherlands. The men were from a Netherlands NGO which works in Tanzania to improve livestock husbandry and production. David Speksnijder visited us in 2007 and has kept in touch regarding the Cattle Dip project. He has given us a lot of information on tick diseases and on livelstock management to help the Salama community. Cosmas and I drove the group down and brought them to cattle dips to meet and discuss things with the community. We hope to impliment their suggestions in conducting Baraza and involving experts from programmes in livestock to improve the productivity of livestock in the Salama area.

Below is an excerpt from the report from the team:
“In several meetings with community members and dip committee members, most people mention that they want to improve the production and health of their livestock to increase their income. However, when it comes down to how they want to increase productivity, most people lack a proper answer on this...”

“It seems like many people in this area lack a basic understanding of farming principles and principles of running a profitable business. Many livestock keepers in this area are originally not farmers, but came from another profession and switched into livestock keeping only a couple of years ago without any education or transfer of knowledge from parents or other people. This lack of knowledge might partly be reflected in the highly variable attendance of the dips. Because people lack the knowledge to valuate the importance of dipping, some livestock keepers cease dipping whenever it costs too many efforts to dip or whenever money is lacking.”

“It is of great importance that people learn the basic skills of farming and livestock keeping. This means education into animal feeding and husbandry, crop farming, irrigation, animal health, breeding, running a profitable business, strategic management, drought management etc. This can be done by means of some workshops and seminars which can be visited by all community members. It might be of use to give some community members more in depth trainings through some courses. In this case the prerequisite has to be fulfilled that these people transfer their gained knowledge and skills to the other community members.”

“It’s very advisable to let some experienced persons make a baseline study in this area, to confirm the suspicion of the lack of basic business skills of the farmers in this area and to make a thorough assessment of the needs, difficulties, strength and opportunities (SWOT analysis) in these communities. With the results of this analysis, an intervention strategy can be chosen which meets the demands and difficulties in the community as good as possible and which can provide the greatest results.”

“Another recommendation is to closely monitor the effects of such programs on livestock health, productivity etc. Hereto, it’s required that it must be clear which parameters will be measured and how these parameters will be measured. Further on, in assessing the impact of the project, it’s important that confounding events like outbreaks of severe livestock diseases are not taken into account. This means that there has to be performed a proper baseline study.”

See our past newsletters for more information on the cattle dip project www.cheetah.org (kenya archives)

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