Healthy livestock provide meaningful opportunities to enhance women’s empowerment (WE) in low- and middle-income countries. Animal vaccines are important to keep livestock healthy and productive. However, gender-based restrictions limit women’s access to animal health services, thereby affecting the potential of livestock to enhance their empowerment. While growing empirical evidence reveals that women-controlled livestock (e.g., small ruminants) have important implications for WE and support better household nutrition outcomes, little empirical evidence exists from rigorous analyses of the relationship between WE and animal vaccines for women-controlled livestock species. Our analysis explores the relationship between WE and involvement with PPR vaccination in Ghana. Data collected using the Women’s Empowerment in Livestock Index (WELI) tool from 465 women and 92 men farmers (who keep goats) from northern Ghana, and analyzed using PLS-SEM, revealed a significant direct positive association between knowledge about animal health and PPR vaccines and a significant indirect positive association between access to PPR vaccines and empowerment. The empowerment of women goat farmers, as revealed by our model’s results for the relationship between empowerment and vaccine facets, was significantly represented by asset ownership and input into decisions concerning livestock. These study results reveal important considerations in designing effective and equitable livestock vaccine systems.

Linking smallholder farmers to large enterprises could be a powerful mechanism to improve input and output markets as well as other productivity‐enhancing services for liquidity constrained smallholders. Dairy hubs promoted by East African Dairy Development project are collective farmer‐owned milk bulking and/or chilling plants through which farmers get access to output markets and inputs as well as other services necessary for their dairy enterprises. The hubs act as a linkage between large processors and smallholder dairy farmers. They enable farmers to supply milk to large dairy processors who are emerging key players in the East African dairy industry. In addition to the different forms of linkages with large processors, these hubs also differ in their level of growth toward sustainability. In light of this background, this work aims to provide evidence on the effects, at farm level, of different types of linkages between smallholder dairy farmers and large processors through dairy hubs. The study uses cross‐sectional survey data collected from 993 smallholder livestock keeping households living within the dairy hubs’ catchment areas in Kenya and Uganda. Statistical tests on technical efficiency estimates from dairy farm enterprises were conducted in order to provide evidence of the effects of the types of processor linkages on the performance of the dairy farm enterprises. The results provide evidence of no strong influence at farm levels that can be attributed to different forms of linkages with processor that dairy hubs adopt. Moreover, though hub sustainability is directly linked to the producer organization's efficiency level, our results show that it does not sufficiently translate to more productive farmers. These findings call for concerted efforts by development agents in the dairy sector, policy makers, and even large processors to intervene in order to support improved farm performance. As evident from the study, one direct policy tool at the disposal of these agents is extension messages. [EconLit citations D24; L25; Q12].

Africa has a shortage of animal products but increasing demand because of population growth, urbanisation and changing consumer patterns. Attempts to boost livestock production through the use of breeding technologies such as artificial insemination (AI) have been failing in many countries because costs have escalated and success rates have been relatively low. One example is Kenya, a country with a relatively large number of cows and a dairy industry model relevant to neighbouring countries. There, an innovative dairy marketing approach (farmer-owned collective marketing systems called dairy hubs) has been implemented to enhance access to dairy markets and dairy-related services, including breeding services such as AI. So far, the rate of participation in these dairy hubs has been slow and mixed. In order to understand this phenomenon better and to inform dairy-related development activities by the Kenyan government, we investigated which characteristics of AI services, offered through the dairy hubs, farmers prefer. To do so, we applied a choice experiment (CE), a non-market valuation technique, which allowed us to identify farmers’ preferences for desired characteristics should more dairy hubs be installed in the future. This is the first study to use a CE to evaluate breeding services in Kenya and the results can complement findings of studies of breeding objectives and selection criteria. The results of the CE reveal that dairy farmers prefer to have AI services offered rather than having no service. Farmers prefer AI services to be available at dairy hubs rather than provided by private agents not affiliated to the hubs, to have follow-up services for pregnancy detections, and to use sexed semen rather than conventional semen. Farmers would further like some flexibility in payment systems which include input credit, and are willing to share the costs of any AI repeats that may need to occur. These results provide evidence of a positive attitude to AI services provided through the hubs, which could mean that AI uptake would improve if service characteristics are improved to match farmer preferences. The dairy hubs concept is currently in the implementation phase with most hubs at startup phase, hence understanding which AI service characteristics farmers prefer can inform the design of high-quality and cost-effective AI services in the future.

In this study we have analysed the effects of household linkages to milk market via dairy hubs currently implemented under the East African Dairy Development project. Our analyses show that participation in dairy hubs increases dairy revenues by USD 1,022 on average. Impacts are higher for households participating in hubs supplying exclusively to processors (USD 1,673) relative to ones supplying hubs that pursue mixed-linkage approach. Moreover, participation in dairy hubs also yields significant effect on household income. Appropriate measures should be undertaken to widen the reach of such processor linkages while also safeguarding existing gains, more so as the processing sector becomes more concentrated.