Livestock Emergency Guidelines And Standards – A Tool For Livestock Emergency Response

Abstract

Climatic trends are causing more frequent and varied humanitarian crisis particularly among livestock keeping communities in developing countries which rely on livestock as a crucial livelihoods asset. Livestock interventions are usually a feature of relief response during human disasters. Despite these responses, the needs of livestock keeping communities are not fully met. Some of the livestock relief projects that have been implemented in the past are inappropriate or are badly implemented. They are characterised by poor analysis, poor stakeholder involvement and late assistance even where disaster is slow onset. These projects have very limited impact assessment and are weakly coordinated with development projects.This has been partly due to lack of clear cut guidelines and standards to assist donors, programme managers and technical experts in the design and implementation of livestock technical interventions during disasters. It is against this background that the Livestock Emergency Guidelines and Standards (LEGS), a set of international standards for improving the quality of livestock programs in humanitarian disasters was developed. LEGS has a global coverage but focuses on regions prone to repeated or large-scale rapid onset, slow onset and complex disasters. LEGS links emergencies to livestock and livelihoods in order to bring a livelihood perspective in livestock based disaster relief, enables humanitarian actors to design and implement projects which help to protect and/or rebuild livestock assets with the ultimate objective of assisting people affected. LEGS gives an insight on how to conduct rapid assessments of livestock and livelihoods, identify appropriate interventions, common standards, livestock technical standards.