Healthy Animals, Healthy Planet

Improving animal health is not only essential to animal welfare and wildlife conservation, it also creates a cascade of effects that can positively impact livelihoods, human health and nutrition, gender equity, and biodiversity. To learn more about this, explore the topics below.

Conservation Through Food and Livelihood Security

Using locally sustainable methods, we enhance animal health and production in underserved  communities to provide greater access to a nutrient dense food source, increase biological efficiency, and improve financial stability through trade and sale of livestock products. To many subsistence farmers, the concept of environmental conservation is beyond the scope of daily survival. However, by prioritizing food security and livestock health first, households can work toward long-term goals to sustain agropastoral traditions through conservation of wildlife, indigenous crops, and natural resources.

Human Health Through Animal Health

We focus on improving the health of low-input animals such as poultry and goats. Increased consumption of animal source food products (meat, eggs, milk) provide essential micronutrients that can reduce nutrition-related illness and death in pregnant and breast feeding women. The same benefits are seen in children, particularly during the first 1000 days of life. We also provide communities, who live in close proximity with animals and share the same resources, with knowledge about the potential for bidirectional disease transfer between humans and animals. Simple preventive measures can be keep both animals and humans healthy. 

Empowering Women and Children

Improved animal health and sustainable production provides opportunities to elevate health, education, and income of women and children, who typically oversee the care of animals, and in the case of women, also manage household nutrition decisions.

Biodiversity Protection

We work to improve the health and resilience of wildlife and natural systems to preserve biodiversity and balance, while allowing local communities to thrive. This is particularly important in areas where local livelihoods depend on mixed animal-crop farming, ecotourism, and sustainable ecosystem provisioning.