Getting by in the dry season: Ololilis in Tanzania

Peer Revie

Reinforcing participation of women in dairy production and marketing in Tanzania

Irish Ai

The Women’s Empowerment in Livestock Index

The empowerment of women in the livestock sector is fundamental to achieve gender equality. It also is instrumental for increased household productivity and improved household health and nutrition. Diverse strategies exist to empower women, yet these strategies are difficult to prioritize without a reliable and adapted means to measure women’s empowerment. One quantitative measure is the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI). Despite its reliability in certain agricultural contexts, the WEAI requires adaptation in settings where livestock farming is the dominant form of livelihood. Using the WEAI as a starting point, a multidisciplinary team of researchers developed the Women’s Empowerment in Livestock Index (WELI), a new index to assess the empowerment of women in the livestock sector. This paper presents the WELI and the dimensions of empowerment it includes: (1) decisions about agricultural production; (2) decisions related to nutrition; (3) access to and control over resources; (4) control and use of income; (5) access to and control of opportunities; and (6) workload and control over own time. The paper illustrates the use of the WELI by introducing pilot findings from dairy smallholders in four districts of northern Tanzania. The paper addresses considerations for the appropriate use and adaptation of the WELI to balance the needs for context specificity and cross-cultural comparisons; it also discusses its limitations. The paper recommends participatory and qualitative methods that are complementary to the WELI to provide context-specific insights on the processes of women’s empowerment in the livestock sector

Cardiovascular Diseases That Have Emerged From the Darkness

It is important for both the patient and physician communities to have timely access to information recognizing rapid progress in the diagnosis and treatment of familiar but relatively uncommon cardiovascular diseases. Patients with 3 cardiovascular diseases (ie, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, pulmonary arterial hypertension, and transthyretin (TTR) cardiac amyloidosis (ATTR)]), once considered rare without effective management options and associated with malignant prognosis, have now benefited substantially from the development of a variety of innovative therapeutic strategies. In addition, in each case, enhanced diagnostic testing has expanded the patient population and allowed for more widespread administration of contemporary treatments. In hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, introduction of implantable defibrillators to prevent sudden death as well as high-benefit:low-risk septal reduction therapies to reverse heart failure have substantially reduced morbidity and disease-related mortality (to 0.5% per year). For pulmonary arterial hypertension, a disease once characterized by a particularly grim prognosis, prospective randomized drug trials with aggressive single (or combined) pharmacotherapy have measurably improved survival and quality of life for many patients. In cardiac amyloidosis, development of disease-specific drugs can for the first time reduce morbidity and mortality, prominently with breakthrough ATTR-protein-stabilizing tafamidis. In conclusion, in less common and visible cardiovascular diseases, it is crucial to recognize substantial progress and achievement, given that penetration of such information into clinical practice and the patient community can be inconsistent. Diseases such as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, pulmonary arterial hypertension, and ATTR cardiac amyloidosis, once linked to a uniformly adverse prognosis, are now associated with the opportunity for patients to experience satisfactory quality of life and extended longevity

A scoping review of market links between value chain actors and small-scale producers in developing regions

Sustainable Development Goal 2 aims to end hunger, achieve food and nutrition security and promote sustainable agriculture by 2030. This requires that small-scale producers be included in, and benefit from, the rapid growth and transformation under way in food systems. Small-scale producers interact with various actors when they link with markets, including product traders, logistics firms, processors and retailers. The literature has explored primarily how large firms interact with farmers through formal contracts and resource provision arrangements. Although important, contracts constitute a very small share of smallholder market interactions. There has been little exploration of whether non-contract interactions between small farmers and both small- and large-scale value chain actors have affected small farmers’ livelihoods. This scoping review covers 202 studies on that topic. We find that non-contract interactions, de facto mostly with small and medium enterprises, benefit small-scale producers via similar mechanisms that the literature has previously credited to large firms. Small and medium enterprises, not just large enterprises, address idiosyncratic market failures and asset shortfalls of small-scale producers by providing them, through informal arrangements, with complementary services such as input provision, credit, information and logistics. Providing these services directly supports Sustainable Development Goal 2 by improving farmer welfare through technology adoption and greater productivity