Community-based animal health training and creative change in Bolivia (PLA 45)

This paper documents a community-based animal health project in Bolivia, set up around three basic premises, and how they approached each one to obtain their objectives. The author goes on to assess the results the project has generated in the 14 years that is has been running.

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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