The other side of GALVmed’s Learning Agenda: What is working well without our help?
GALVmed’s mission focuses on improving the availability and adoption of essential animal health products for Small-scale Livestock Producers (SLPs). In this mission, we focus on the significant constraints imposed by livestock diseases and the considerable barriers in the supply of animal health products (particularly vaccines requiring an effective cold chain) into remote, rural, ‘last mile’ areas.
However, just as important as understanding these constraints and barriers is the need to understand what is already working well in the ‘last mile’. Here, our focus is on the existing availability of animal health products to SLPs without any form of intervention.
We are routinely surprised at how strong this is for some animal health product classes and for some SLP segments. The below table shows the availability of several classes of poultry vaccines in the last mile in Nigeria (from a sample of 6 agrovet retailers with 5 found to have a fridge).
Furthermore, the SLP perception of product quality appears to be good suggesting that vaccine failure is not experienced (suggesting that the cold chain works reasonably well). An example from a 2019 M&E in Nigeria demonstrates this perception:
The above examples are a helpful reminder that product availability and adoption by SLPs is not uniformly bad – and that GALVmed’s work needs to focus on the considerable unmet SLP needs that still exist.
Written by Neil Gammon