Month: April 2025

Vaccinated day-old chicks brings transformational change for Africa’s farmers

Posted on by team galvmed

This blog was written by Dr Tom Osebe, (Senior Manager, Commercial Development & Impact, Africa, GALVmed) and Dr Marie Ducrotoy (Senior Manager Development Projects and Partnerships, Ceva Santé Animale). Originally published by Farming First.

The power of poultry to boost development in Africa is well known. Cheap to buy and quick to rear, chickens offer small-scale livestock producers across the continent – especially women – an opportunity to increase incomes and improve diets for themselves and their families. It is no surprise that an estimated 1 billion of the world’s poorest people depend on poultry for their livelihoods.

However, poultry diseases remain a persistent threat to small-scale chicken production in Africa. In contrast to other parts of the world where poultry production is integrated and dominated by large players who both produce and rear their chicks, Africa’s fragmented value chain presents unique challenges. African poultry farmers are served by small- and medium-sized hatcheries and many of these have not invested in vaccine technology. 

Compounding the issue is a lack of farmer awareness regarding the existence and benefits of vaccinated day-old chicks. This lack of demand perpetuates a cycle where smaller hatcheries have no commercial incentive to invest in vaccination technology. As a result, the burden of vaccination falls on the farmers themselves. 

Farm vaccination, however, is fraught with challenges. It is technical and requires adherence to a cold chain to ensure vaccine efficacy. Even under optimal conditions, on-farm vaccination typically results in 80 per cent of the flock being vaccinated.

De-risking hatchery vaccination

It seemed like an intractable chicken-and-egg problem: to increase the production of vaccinated day-old chicks in Africa, we need increased demand for them from farmers. But increasing demand requires farmers to buy vaccinated chicks through a better understanding of the value.

Fortunately, we have been able to work on a project that has succeeded in breaking the impasse – one that holds promise for poultry production across the continent. In 2021, Ceva Animal Health teamed with GALVmed, with the support of the Gates Foundation, to implement a game-changing four-year project, PREVENT (Promoting and Enabling Vaccination Efficiently, Now and Tomorrow).

PREVENT used a two-pronged approach to enable medium-sized hatcheries in 11 sub-Saharan African countries to produce high-quality, vaccinated day-old chicks. The funding financed the supply of the necessary vaccination equipment and improved the vaccination facilities, making it financially more accessible for hatcheries to then purchase vaccines. This then enabled Ceva to supply its vaccines to these hatcheries – opening up a major new sector of Africa’s poultry industry.

Crucially, to increase demand for vaccinated chicks, PREVENT also raised awareness of their value among small-scale producers. The project trained 225 field technicians, and of these, 70 field technicians conducted over 20,000 farm visits and held almost 2,000 farmer meetings attended by more than 23,000 women and 20,000 men. As well as highlighting the benefits of purchasing vaccinated day-old chicks, field technicians helped farmers improve their management practices and took samples to better understand circulating diseases and antimicrobial resistance.

Raising farmer expectations

We were delighted – and even a little surprised – to see how effective this approach proved. The sudden increase in farmer demand for vaccinated chicks encouraged a rapid shift in small- to medium-sized hatcheries. Between 2021 and 2025, 37 hatcheries in 11 countries produced 202 million day-old chicks thanks to the project. Of these, 90 per cent – 182 million chicks – were vaccinated, with a total of 494 million vaccine doses administered. This has created a net economic benefit of $43 million over the course of the project.

But these numbers, as impressive as they are, do not tell the full story. By increasing the availability and accessibility of fully vaccinated day-old chicks, and by raising smallholder awareness of their value, PREVENT has achieved a fundamental and permanent shift in farmer understanding and expectations in the countries where it operated. Small-scale poultry producers are no longer willing to settle for unvaccinated chicks.

This new attitude has laid the foundations for a prosperous, self-sustaining and increasingly competitive vaccine market that reaches small-scale producers and reduces vaccine inequality. With PREVENT now coming to a close, we are happy that this legacy will ensure day-old vaccinated chicks continue to reach poultry farmers without the need for additional donor funding.

“PREVENT is a good example of collaboration between parties where the vision was not only realised, but surpassed,” says Dr Pierre-Marie Borne, Senior Public Affairs at Ceva Santé Animale, who was the pioneer of PREVENT and saw the vision of how hatchery vaccination had the potential to impact poultry businesses and millions of small-scale producers across Africa.   

Boosting smallholder livelihoods

And it is these poultry farmers who are now leveraging PREVENT’s achievements for their own empowerment and commercial success. “The results have been so good – it has added to my profits because I no longer have losses as before,” says Victoria Oladijiri, a poultry farmer from Nigeria who switched to purchasing vaccinated chicks as a result of PREVENT. “I use the profits for provisions at home and for so many other good things.” Other farmers to benefit from PREVENT have reported similar positive changes. 

As PREVENT comes to an end, it is our hope that stories like Victoria’s will become the norm throughout Africa, as a thriving vaccines market breaks down the vaccine inequality that has for too long held back the development potential of poultry. We believe the project’s model of de-risking investment in smaller hatcheries, while increasing farmers’ understanding and expectations, holds promise across the continent – both in poultry and even other animal production sectors.

Social extension: Mentoring field technicians to deliver poultry extension services

Posted on by team galvmed

Mentoring has the power to positively impact everyone involved, as evidenced by an initiative to mentor field technicians in Tanzania to provide inclusive veterinary extension to small-scale poultry producers.

Field technicians from the PREVENT (PRomoting and Enabling Vaccination Efficiently, Now and Tomorrow) initiative were paired with business women (chicken vendors) who had previously participated in the CGIAR’s Women in Business initiative in a unique mentorship program to enable them deliver more equitable extension services to their customers. PREVENT is an initiative of Ceva Animal Health in collaboration with GALVmed and funded by Gates Foundation.

Since 2021, the PREVENT initiative has been working with small-to-mid-size hatcheries in 11 sub-Saharan African countries to produce high-quality, vaccinated day-old chicks. These vaccinated chicks are mostly sold to small businesses. The hatcheries in the PREVENT initiative work with field technicians – women and men who provide technical input to the poultry producers, helping them with much needed flock management, health and husbandry advice, and raising awareness about the benefits of vaccinated chicks, therefore creating demand.

The PREVENT initiative initiated a mentoring program to build the capacity of the field technicians to deliver gender-responsive extension services and qualitatively document lessons learned. Gender-responsive extension services address inequalities by considering the needs, experiences, and roles of women, men, girls, and boys. Other individual characteristics like age, ethnic group, and education level also influence the way people engage with veterinary extension services, hence the term ‘social extension’.

Twelve Field technicians were paired with five mentors over a period of five months. Researchers from the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) led the development of the mentoring program and the Tanzania Livestock Research Institute (TALIRI) provided technical guidance.  Content included discussing gendered roles in chicken value chains, restrictive gender norms that can limit women in poultry businesses, and discussing how identities of farmers and extension officers can influence the interactions. Some examples of inclusive extension include considering the best times of day to visit men and women given their other activities, acknowledging contributions and needs for knowledge by less visible people including household employees and children, and considering how the identity of the extension provider will influence their relationship with clients.

The outcome of the mentoring program was positive with the mentees acknowledging that while academic and vocational training focused on veterinary and bioscience content, the social extension aspect was missing and the mentoring program has increased their understanding of gender norms while providing extension services.

I have realized that building up social relationships allows farm owners and managers to freely share insights with field technicians during extension services provision, regardless of skill level or gender.

– Elisha, mentee from Dar es Salaam.

Recognizing women’s ability and their contributions is crucial and providing equal opportunities to both men and women is essential for the development of the poultry value chain. Some large-scale poultry farmers still don’t seem comfortable with women field technicians but let us work hard to deliver quality services that will continue building their trust in us.

– Grace, mentee from Pwani Region.

Agricultural extension and veterinary care in Tanzania’s poultry business are frequently dominated by men. Two of the ten field technicians in the PREVENT project are women. Through the mentorship initiative, field technicians were connected with five young women who were already empowered in the poultry industry. In doing so, the prejudice that social extension is dominated by men was broken. At the level of farmers, field technicians are now providing training on the importance of inclusivity and cooperation on chick rearing activities in households that they visit.

– Laura, Field Technician Coordinator

A seed planted

Even though the mentorship program has concluded, the researchers are optimistic that a seed has been planted into the minds of the young mentees who will go forward to provide inclusive extension services to poultry producers and beyond. The researchers are urging any training programs for veterinary extension workers to incorporate social and gender considerations into their curriculum. Because being inclusive makes good business sense.

Written by Beatrice Ouma (GALVmed), Zoe Campbell (ILRI) & Humphrey Jumba (ILRI)