The document summarizes the Participatory Welfare Need Assessment (PWNA) process used by Brooke India to assess the health and welfare of working horses, mules, and donkeys. The PWNA is a participatory tool that facilitates communities to (1) develop their own indicators for assessing equine health and welfare, (2) identify issues, and (3) take collective action to improve husbandry practices and health status. It involves forming equine welfare groups, indicator development, transect walks to record data, analysis of results, and repeated assessments to monitor impact over time. The goal is to build community capabilities and empower owners to sustainably improve animal health and welfare.

1. PENAPH – First technical workshop
12 December, 2012
Murad Ali
Senior Programme Officer,
Brooke India
Participatory Impact Assessment of Animal
Health Through Collective Action

2. The Brooke: An overview
• The Brooke is an International animal welfare charity
founded in 1934 by Dorothy Brooke, wife of a Cavalry
General
• The Brooke is dedicated to improving the lives of
working horses, mules and donkeys
• The Brooke India is an affiliate of Brooke UK, working
in 8 states of India through 30 units, covering .23
million equine population
2

3. Introduction:
• Animal health and welfare problems are diverse and
often very specific to the context in which the animal
works
• Various methods are being applied to assess the health
and welfare status of animals
• Brooke India evolved an innovative participatory
process to assess the status of animal health,
husbandry practices and related resources, called
“Participatory Welfare Need Assessment”- PWNA
3

4. Introduction:
PWNA is set of participatory tools which facilitates
communities to:
develop their own indicators for assessing equine
health and welfare,
identify their issues and;
taking collective action to improve husbandry
practices and health status of their animals
4

5. Participatory Welfare Need Assessment (PWNA)
5

6. Steps of PWNA
1 Build understanding on health
and welfare of animals
2 Develop assessment Protocol
3 Transect walk & Recording
4 Analysis and Collective action:
5 Repeat transect walk to observe
the changes/impact
6

7. Process:
Step-1- Building understanding on animal welfare
• Mobilize equine owners into “Equine Welfare Group”
• Build understanding on five freedom
• Build understanding on welfare issue through:
horse puzzle game,
children art competition,
body mapping etc.
7

8. Step-2 : Developing Assessment Protocol
8
“If I were a horse” an animal centric tool used to finalize
assessment criteria with the community
Horse in the center
What do you expect from
owners?
Present status about expectation
fulfillment in 0-10 scale ?
Effect when expectation were
not met
Effect, where it can be seen in
animal body, practice and
resources
Putting own-self at
the place of animal
and start with
expectations from
its owner to enable
the community to
identify health and
welfare needs.
Putting own-self at
the place of animal
and start with
expectations from
its owner to enable
the community to
identify health and
welfare needs.

9. Field exercise : “If I were a horse”
9

10. “If I were a horse”: Output
Husbandry practice related
Animal related
Resource related
10
Symbol Means
●●● Green circle for good welfare status
●●● Blue/yellow circle for average welfare status
●●● Red circle reflect as poor welfare status
An understanding on scoring/marking method developed
Type of indicator /criteria developed

11. Step-3: Transect walk and Recording
Use of “Traffic Light” tool for transect walk and recording11

12. Transect walk and recording
12

13. Step- :4 Analysis and Collective action
List of
indicators
Name of owners Total
1 2 3 4
A
● ● ● ●
B
● ● ● ●
C
● ● ● ●
D
● ● ● ●
E
● ● ● ●
Total
To analyse
prevalence
of issues of
the
community
Root cause analysis
of issues
Collective action to
address issue
followed by
developing village
action plan
To analyse animal/owners wise ranking
Inspiring best performing owners / prize distribution
After the transect walk community members sit along
with staff to analyze the chart of transect walk
13

14. Step-5: Repeat the transect walk on regular interval
• Transect walk on regular intervals helps analyze the changing trend
in each indicator
• Based on need and increasing sensitivity towards animals health
and welfare, the indicators and process of transect walk keeps
changing
• Action plan developed based on contributing factors such as
season, work load, feeding practices, internal and external
influences
• Best performing owners, communities, sub-districts awarded on
regular interval on the basis of positive changes
14

15. Repeated transect
Regular transect walk on same chart
16
Meeting and prize distribution

16. Main Results / Impact
• Numbers and type of assessment criteria/indicators changed
according to situations, need and awareness level of the community
• Scoring/transect methods and process of analysis changed after
sensitization of community
16
√X or √
Binary
● ● ●
Traffic light
score
0,5,10 or 1-10
Numerical
scoring
1,4,3 / 7,10,15
Weighting according to
importance of
indicators/issues
Mostly
animal based
indicators
Indicators
covering animals,
practices and
resources
Reducing
numbers of
indicators based
on sensitivity
Indicators based
on their severity

17. Main Results / Impact
• Software based aggregation and analysis of PWNA/transect
walk data at district level by categorizing indicators and using
them for comparative analysis between villages and districts
• These analysis helps uncovering higher level factors
responsible for the positive and negative status of working
equine
• Responsibility of carrying out transect walk and their analysis
handed-over from staff to communities based institutions
17
Staff led at
village level
Equal
involvement of
staff and
Community
Community led at
Village level
Association led at
sub district level

18. Main Results / Impact
• Visible improvement in the health & welfare of animals such
as improved body condition, reduction in wound etc.
• The process builds capability of local community in:
early recognition of negative changes and diseases of
animals and;
taking prompt and effective action
• Improvement in husbandry practices such as cleaning of
stable, grooming, feeding, watering have also seen.
18

19. 19
• Observation of each others animals by group members during
transect walk helps:
creating peer pressure to act towards better care of
animals
promoting mutual learning and;
strengthening the problem solving capacity of the
communities
Incremental improvement in health and welfare status have
been seen in whole process
Main Results / Impact

20. Conclusion
• A sustainable impact on working equines health and welfare status,
resources and husbandry practices through regular collective
assessment of animals and analysis of finding and acting upon it
• Understanding the trends of equine welfare indicators and their
contributing factors to equine welfare at various level helps Brooke India
strategize its programmatic approach
• PWNA emerged as one of the key process of empowering equine owing
community towards better equine welfare in sustainable manner
20

21. !
21
THANK YOU !