Participatory impact assessment of animal health through collective action

PENAPH – First technical workshop
12 December, 2012
Murad Ali
Senior Programme Officer,
Brooke India
Participatory Impact Assessment of Animal
Health Through Collective Action

The Brooke: An overview
• The Brooke is an International animal welfare charity
founded in 1934 by Dorothy Brooke, wife of a Cavalry
General
• The Brooke is dedicated to improving the lives of
working horses, mules and donkeys
• The Brooke India is an affiliate of Brooke UK, working
in 8 states of India through 30 units, covering .23
million equine population
2

Introduction:
• Animal health and welfare problems are diverse and
often very specific to the context in which the animal
works
• Various methods are being applied to assess the health
and welfare status of animals
• Brooke India evolved an innovative participatory
process to assess the status of animal health,
husbandry practices and related resources, called
“Participatory Welfare Need Assessment”- PWNA
3

Introduction:
PWNA is set of participatory tools which facilitates
communities to:
develop their own indicators for assessing equine
health and welfare,
identify their issues and;
taking collective action to improve husbandry
practices and health status of their animals
4

Participatory Welfare Need Assessment (PWNA)
5

Steps of PWNA
1 Build understanding on health
and welfare of animals
2 Develop assessment Protocol
3 Transect walk & Recording
4 Analysis and Collective action:
5 Repeat transect walk to observe
the changes/impact
6

Process:
Step-1- Building understanding on animal welfare
• Mobilize equine owners into “Equine Welfare Group”
• Build understanding on five freedom
• Build understanding on welfare issue through:
horse puzzle game,
children art competition,
body mapping etc.
7

Step-2 : Developing Assessment Protocol
8
“If I were a horse” an animal centric tool used to finalize
assessment criteria with the community
Horse in the center
What do you expect from
owners?
Present status about expectation
fulfillment in 0-10 scale ?
Effect when expectation were
not met
Effect, where it can be seen in
animal body, practice and
resources
Putting own-self at
the place of animal
and start with
expectations from
its owner to enable
the community to
identify health and
welfare needs.
Putting own-self at
the place of animal
and start with
expectations from
its owner to enable
the community to
identify health and
welfare needs.

Field exercise : “If I were a horse”
9

“If I were a horse”: Output
Husbandry practice related
Animal related
Resource related
10
Symbol Means
●●● Green circle for good welfare status
●●● Blue/yellow circle for average welfare status
●●● Red circle reflect as poor welfare status
An understanding on scoring/marking method developed
Type of indicator /criteria developed

Step-3: Transect walk and Recording
Use of “Traffic Light” tool for transect walk and recording11

Transect walk and recording
12

Step- :4 Analysis and Collective action
List of
indicators
Name of owners Total
1 2 3 4
A
● ● ● ●
B
● ● ● ●
C
● ● ● ●
D
● ● ● ●
E
● ● ● ●
Total
To analyse
prevalence
of issues of
the
community
Root cause analysis
of issues
Collective action to
address issue
followed by
developing village
action plan
To analyse animal/owners wise ranking
Inspiring best performing owners / prize distribution
After the transect walk community members sit along
with staff to analyze the chart of transect walk
13

Step-5: Repeat the transect walk on regular interval
• Transect walk on regular intervals helps analyze the changing trend
in each indicator
• Based on need and increasing sensitivity towards animals health
and welfare, the indicators and process of transect walk keeps
changing
• Action plan developed based on contributing factors such as
season, work load, feeding practices, internal and external
influences
• Best performing owners, communities, sub-districts awarded on
regular interval on the basis of positive changes
14

Repeated transect
Regular transect walk on same chart
16
Meeting and prize distribution

Main Results / Impact
• Numbers and type of assessment criteria/indicators changed
according to situations, need and awareness level of the community
• Scoring/transect methods and process of analysis changed after
sensitization of community
16
√X or √
Binary
● ● ●
Traffic light
score
0,5,10 or 1-10
Numerical
scoring
1,4,3 / 7,10,15
Weighting according to
importance of
indicators/issues
Mostly
animal based
indicators
Indicators
covering animals,
practices and
resources
Reducing
numbers of
indicators based
on sensitivity
Indicators based
on their severity

• Software based aggregation and analysis of PWNA/transect
walk data at district level by categorizing indicators and using
them for comparative analysis between villages and districts
• These analysis helps uncovering higher level factors
responsible for the positive and negative status of working
equine
• Responsibility of carrying out transect walk and their analysis
handed-over from staff to communities based institutions
17
Staff led at
village level
Equal
involvement of
staff and
Community
Community led at
Village level
Association led at
sub district level

• Visible improvement in the health & welfare of animals such
as improved body condition, reduction in wound etc.
• The process builds capability of local community in:
early recognition of negative changes and diseases of
animals and;
taking prompt and effective action
• Improvement in husbandry practices such as cleaning of
stable, grooming, feeding, watering have also seen.
18

19
• Observation of each others animals by group members during
transect walk helps:
creating peer pressure to act towards better care of
animals
promoting mutual learning and;
strengthening the problem solving capacity of the
communities
Incremental improvement in health and welfare status have
been seen in whole process

Conclusion
• A sustainable impact on working equines health and welfare status,
resources and husbandry practices through regular collective
assessment of animals and analysis of finding and acting upon it
• Understanding the trends of equine welfare indicators and their
contributing factors to equine welfare at various level helps Brooke India
strategize its programmatic approach
• PWNA emerged as one of the key process of empowering equine owing
community towards better equine welfare in sustainable manner
20

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