Transforming Last-Mile Animal Health Services to Build Resilience in Ethiopia
The Resilience in Pastoral Areas-North program used a market systems development approach to successfully catalyze sustainable animal health services reaching last-mile lowland communities.
Image
Poor animal health is a key driver of low livestock productivity, food insecurity and poverty in the arid lowlands of Ethiopia. Underlying this problem is the failure of public or private sector veterinary services to reach geographically dispersed pastoralist and agro-pastoralist communities.
This learning brief describes how the Mercy Corps-led Resilience in Pastoral Areas-North (RIPA-North) Program learned from past failures and used a market systems development (MSD) approach to successfully catalyze sustainable animal health services reaching last-mile lowland communities. The brief highlights how private sector models can be applied, even in thin markets and fragile contexts, to build the resilience of vulnerable communities.
Key Challenges
- Government services are limited to disease surveillance and mass vaccination campaigns.
- Private veterinary pharmacies (PVPs) are largely restricted to district capitals far from rural communities, so it’s difficult and expensive for households to reach them.
- There is a well-developed network of Community Animal Health Workers (CAHWs) in the lowlands, but virtually none play a role as market actors delivering ongoing services.
- Past efforts by development actors to strengthen private sector animal health services have largely failed to build sustainable services that reach last-mile rural communities.
RIPA-North Intervention Approach
The vision of the RIPA-North team was to catalyze a dynamic and resilient network of private sector actors delivering quality animal health services to last-mile communities across the lowlands of Ethiopia, with a focus on accessibility for female livestock producers.
The RIPA-North team realized the pivotal challenge was to introduce a viable model for market-oriented last-mile agents for PVPs. Instead of directly supporting CAHWs to become last-mile agents, RIPA-North’s approach focused on empowering PVPs to build their own last-mile agent network. To test this new approach, Mercy Corps identified “early adopter” PVPs through a competitive process and provided a structured package of technical and financial support. The new business model of proactively investing in last-mile agents was embraced by partner PVPs, who introduced a range of services to support their agent network.
Impact of RIPA-North Intervention
RIPA-North’s first measure of intervention success is whether the approach succeeded in stimulating sustainable changes in the market system. Most of RIPA-North’s partnerships with PVPs began in December 2021, and after almost two years of partnership, there is strong evidence that the model has been exceptionally successful in stimulating sustainable market system change.
The second measure of intervention success, and the most important, is the degree to which the market system change has: 1) resulted in target rural populations purchasing veterinary services, and 2) positively impacted their livelihood outcomes and resilience. RIPA-North data shows that 21,000 households are now regularly accessing professional animal health services each quarter, compared with 6,000 before the RIPA-North intervention. Given that 35% of sales are through last-mile agents, we also know that these services are reaching remote, rural populations.
Assessing the impact of access to animal health services on livelihood and resilience outcomes is not straightforward. RIPA-North uses an annual population-based survey, including control groups, but this captures the impact of all RIPA-North interventions and it’s not possible to isolate just the impact of veterinary services. The strongest indication that the services are having a positive impact is the willingness of large numbers of pastoralists and agro-pastoralists to purchase and use the services, since they are experts in livestock production and would not continue to invest if they didn’t see the benefit. Strikingly, RIPA-North’s annual survey found that 39% of households in RIPA areas had purchased veterinary services during the recent severe drought, compared with just 3% in non-RIPA control groups.