Linking research and community-based animal healthcare in East Africa (PLA 45)

Community-based animal health workers are extremely effective at controlling the vast majority of animal diseases. However, they have difficulties when faced with two diseases that have similar symptoms and often need assistance to help govern long-term management of diseases. This paper looks at a project to link these community-based workers to veterinary researchers, citing evidence from case studies.

This article was published in PLA 45: Community-based animal healthcare. This special issue looks 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, this collection of papers address many of the factors that hinder the use of CAHWs, like the lack of recognition within governments and problems with complex disease management, while also detailing the many advantages, like unparalleled access to communities and short training periods in comparison to formally trained veterinary doctors.

Participatory Learning and Action (PLA, formerly PLA Notes) is the world's leading series on participatory learning and action approaches and methods. PLA publishes articles on participation aimed at practitioners, researchers, academics and activists. All articles are peer-reviewed by an international editorial board. See: www.planotes.org.

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