QUICK LINKS
2.2.1 UNDERSTAND AND PRIORITISE ANIMAL WELFARE ISSUES BASED ON PARTICIPATORY WELFARE NEEDS ASSESSMENT
2.2.2 IDENTIFY ROOT CAUSES OF PRIORITIZED ANIMAL WELFARE ISSUES
2.2.3 DEVELOP SHARED COMMUNITY VISION FOR IMPROVING ANIMAL WELFARE AND COMMUNITY ACTION PLAN TO ADDRESS PRIORITIZED ISSUE
HELPFUL TOOLS AND RESOURCES
2.2.1 Understand and prioritise animal welfare issues based on participatory welfare needs assessment
This step brings the community together around a common goal and builds their confidence in their own ability to bring about positive change in their animals’ lives by working together as a group. Develop the community’s key concerns about the welfare of their animals to identify which they would like to address, and to unite them around a common activity or goal (‘entry point’).
The group identified the welfare issues affecting their animals through a participatory animal welfare needs assessment. Their next task is to decide which problems are the most serious or important to change, by ranking issues according to their importance. This helps the group members to set a realistic agenda for their own actions within limited financial and other resources. Remember to appreciate that no group is homogenous, for example there will be gender-based differences in control and access to resources (Gender control analysis (T10)), group dependency on external actors (Dependency analysis (T12)) and differing income/ expenditure to consider (Income, expenditure, and credit analysis (T13)). People will only be motivated to act when they identify such issues themselves and then discuss and formulate them into clearly expressed needs for both animals and people, along with a common vision of the expected improved situation.
You can facilitate the group to rank these welfare issues according to their priorities for acting, by using simple discussion or by writing the issues on separate cards and agreeing an order of preference (also known as Preference ranking). Alternatively, you may use Pair-wise ranking and scoring (T8) or Matrix ranking and scoring (T9). In our experience many groups use a combination of tools e.g. pairwise preference ranking followed by matrix ranking. It is important that issues are prioritized according to the preferences of the animal owning community members themselves, rather than according to the priorities of your supporting agency. If the group does not have ownership of decisions, action will not follow.
The list of animal welfare issues is often a long one and the group cannot act on all of them at the same time. It may be useful to sort the list into problems that need immediate action (within one month) and those that are medium-term goals (action to be taken within about one year) or long-term goals (two years or more).
2.2.2 Identify root causes of prioritised animal welfare issues
To help the community better understand the context in which you are seeking to promote behavioural change to improve animal welfare, facilitate them in undertaking a root cause analysis of identified animal welfare issues to gain an in-depth understanding of the problems using a participatory learning and action tools such as Problem Animal (T25), Animal Welfare Cause and Effect Analysis (T26), and Animal Welfare Practice Gap Analysis (T21). Conducting a root cause analysis of welfare issues will help the group understand and identify the underlying causes for their priority welfare issues. For example, there might be seasonal variations in capacity of some individuals to earn money, such as migrant workers in brick kilns who may have only occasional work when the brick kiln season ends (six-month periods) which means financial resources are extremely limited throughout much of the year.
It is useful to consider the effects of contributing factors on the owner and their family, as well as on the animal, as this can provide a motivator to act. Through these activity discussions, you will gain deeper insights into the broader context and potential constraints and opportunities communities face in making animal welfare improvements, as well as highlight potential opportunities for undertaking one health or one welfare initiatives.
It is important that you are patient and encourage the group to reflect carefully and to analyze the causes or contributing factors in detail. If the discussion is pushed too fast, people may not have time to come out with the real underlying causes. For example, wounds do not usually resolve if just cleaned, the root cause of the wound may be more complex, but it is important the group are encouraged to work out these more complex root causes together. You as the facilitator can support this process by probing the group to dig deeper to identify the deeper causal factors by repeatedly asking what causes each cause identified, until no further causes can be identified, and they arrive at the underlying root cause. This process also helps us to understand how people view the root causes and their belief system about possibility of behavior change, and it will be important to listen to listen for change talk during this discussion to better understand what stage of change the group may be in. Refer to the facilitator resource 6. Techniques for Supporting Progress through the Stages of Behavior Change for further guidance on how to support group members change process. Understanding the root causes may also help identify key stakeholders who need to be engaged with the project and community, or who may need to act or adopt changes for animal welfare to improve. Use the Project Action Tracker resource to keep records of important insights and findings to inform your project planning. For example, communities’ priority issues, their root causes, including any capability, motivation or opportunity related preconditions that need to be in place for communities to be able to address the welfare issue which they/you may have identified through discussions, as well as any potential needs or opportunities to engage other key stakeholders in the project.
2.2.3 Develop shared community vision for improving animal welfare and community action plan to address prioritized issues
The community action plan serves as an open community ‘contract’ for action, it notes who will take which action and when, helping people to take responsibility for addressing problems in a systematic way and building in accountability. It also brings agreement on the support that they need to implement the plan: from you, the project, and other external institutions or stakeholders. This process will be repeated when they decide to work on the next prioritized issue. To ensure accountability, and aid transparency and sustainability of the project, this plan should also cover your withdrawal (where applicable depending on the duration of the project) and hand over of any relevant elements, this is to ensure the process is undertaken effectively and supports the continued success of the community action.
Before undertaking action planning, revisit the group’s agreement on what good animal welfare and husbandry and management practices are considering previous Animal welfare transect walk (T22) results. Encourage consideration of improving welfare across multiple domains because this will have greater cumulative welfare impact than improving welfare in only one domain. Facilitate discussions using Community Animal Welfare Visioning (T30) to identify their collective vision for what they would like the community’s animal welfare to look like in their local context. Use this vision to guide community action planning and the identification of what needs to change for them to achieve their vision.
WHAT ABOUT INCURABLE WELFARE ISSUES?
It is important to appreciate that some welfare issues cannot be improved, such as chronic conditions or incurable disease. In these instances, it would be helpful to discuss with the group what could be done to prevent these welfare issues in the future, and how these conditions may be managed for those animals affected. Consider inviting relevant animal health and welfare experts to these discussions to share relevant information and expertise as needed to promote informed discussion and ensure any preventative measures identified do no harm.
Once the group has agreed on the root causes for each key problem encourage community members to record the specific behaviours which need to change and then develop a community action plan for implementing these changes. Support the group in creating an action for each root cause, encouraging them to think about what practices they need to change for their priority animal welfare issues to be addressed, and what needs to be in place for them to adopt the desired practices. The Animal welfare practice gap analysis (T21) can be helpful to use here, as can the Story Telling: Animal Welfare Before and After Story (T24b) which can help to identify the steps or change in behavior they can take to improve their animals’ welfare. Depending upon the group size and dynamics, everyone may wish to work together or to break into smaller sub-groups to identify possible actions to address their priority animal welfare issues, with sub-groups brought back together to discuss and comment on each other’s’ work and offer suggestions for changes. Check all priority issues have been covered.
ATTENTION!
Involving men, women and children at every stage of the planning process, either together or separately, can ensure better and more sustainable results in the long term. This is because each can often play an integral role in improving their animals' welfare.
The major contributors to the community action plan should be the animal owners’ group (men, women, and children), because the plan is designed to reflect their interests. However, if issues with animal health or resource service provision have been identified as a priority issue/root cause of animal welfare issues during the community action planning process, it can be helpful to meet with local service providers and communities in separate sessions to come up with indicators/criteria of good quality service. Use these sessions to evaluate service providers where service providers self-evaluate themselves, and communities separately also evaluate them. Come back together to review synthesized anonymised results. This process gives an opportunity for assessing present situations, and challenging assumptions and perceptions of the current quality of service. During this process it should be possible to identify potential ways the community can work together to improve. Consider using Community Score Card (T35) tool to support these discussions.
One of the core competencies required for this is to have strong facilitation skills to smooth discussions during joint sessions and enable a secure, productive, transparent, and accountable discussion, reflection, planning and monitoring process.
Sometimes a simple plan may be prepared by the group, based on one or two (maximum of three) very urgent issues for immediate action, or those of particular interest to the members. As the group becomes more confident they may wish to produce a more comprehensive action plan. Whatever the size of the plan, it must be specific. The plan should include:
- The welfare issue identified.
- Change indicators identified and how they will be monitored
- The cause(s) of each issue (based on the root cause analysis).
- Action to be taken against each root cause – such as identifying what behaviour or practices need to adopt
- Who will undertake each action (clear roles and responsibilities)?
- When to perform each action (time frame).
- Who will monitor that the action is really taken as agreed?
- Any resources or support required to implement these actions
Community action planning leads to two types of action:
- Individual action by each member of the group to benefit their own animal. These individual actions, or changes in behaviour, are decided collectively by the group and are monitored by the group.
- Collective action by the whole group to solution common animal welfare issues that could otherwise not be solved as effectively through individual action, and which benefit all the animals belonging to group members (e.g. organizing vaccinations or bulk feed purchases at reduced costs, advocating for improving access and/or availability of animal related resources and/or services).
While one of the main benefits of group formation is the potential for collection action, motivation to work together to address their shared interests may not be sufficient in the early stages of group formation, particularly if resource investment is required and the group does not know each other well. It is normal for it to take time for community members to form a cohesive group that is willing and able to work together. However, consider using the following tools which can be helpful in identifying the need and motivation for collective action: Dependency analysis (T12), and Income credit and expenditure analysis (T13). Where costs may be high, forming a savings group or working together for collective purchases or production may help lower costs and make resources for accessible/available for caring for their animals.
It is vital to discuss how implementation of the action plan will be measured and monitored. Monitoring is most effective when group members agree to monitor each other. This brings in peer pressure and peer encouragement for action. As each step in the action plan succeeds, the community facilitators can lead a process of action and reflection to generate further incremental steps towards practical, sustainable improvement in animal welfare. Encourage the group to discuss past experiences or previous efforts made to tackle issues, so that their lessons learned can contribute to any new plan.
Tools and resources helpful to supporting this step include:
PLA Tools
Animal welfare practice gap analysis (T21)
Income, Expenditure & Credit Analysis (T13)
Gender Control Analysis (T10)
Dependency Analysis (T12)
Animal welfare transect walk (T22)
Pair-wise ranking and scoring (T8)
Matrix ranking and scoring (T9)
Story Telling: Animal Welfare Before and After Story (T24b)
Problem animal (T25)
Animal welfare cause and effect analysis (T26)
Community Animal Welfare Visioning (T30)
Community score card (T35)
Facilitator Resources
6. Techniques for Supporting Progress through the stages of Change
20. Project Action Tracker
