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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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”

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“If I were a horse”: Output

Husbandry practice related

Animal related

Resource related

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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 recording 11

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

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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

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Repeated transect

Regular transect walk on same chart

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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

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√ 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

Main Results / Impact

• 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

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Staff led at village level

Equal involvement of staff and Community

Community led at Village level

Association led at sub district level

Main Results / Impact

• 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.

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• 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

Main Results / Impact

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

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THANK YOU !