One Health and pandemic preparedness
One Health consulting across Africa: veterinary service strengthening, risk-based surveillance, laboratory systems, and pandemic preparedness.
Read moreCapacity development and knowledge systems
Veterinary capacity development and knowledge systems consulting.
Livestock Futures designs and delivers training, institutional capacity assessments, and knowledge products for veterinary professionals, public agencies, and field teams.
Capacity development has a poor reputation, largely earned. A great deal of it consists of workshops that are enjoyed, evaluated on satisfaction, and produce no measurable change in what the institution can do afterwards.
The failure is usually diagnostic. Training is delivered because training is the available instrument, not because a skills gap was the actual constraint. Where the real limitation is equipment, budget, staffing, or authority, no amount of training will move it - and saying so is more useful than delivering a course that changes nothing.
Assessing capacity before designing a response
Assessment work distinguishes between individual competence, institutional capability, and the enabling environment. These require entirely different responses, and conflating them is why so many capacity interventions underperform.
Where training is genuinely the right instrument, it is designed around what participants must be able to do on returning to post, with the content, sequencing, and follow-up built accordingly.
- Human and institutional capacity assessments
- Training needs analysis grounded in actual job tasks
- Curriculum and course design
- Delivery for veterinary professionals, field teams, and public agencies
- Technical mentoring and follow-up support
Knowledge products that get used
Technical knowledge in the livestock sector is frequently produced in formats nobody downstream reads. A 90-page report answers a reporting obligation; it rarely changes a decision.
Knowledge product work therefore starts from who has to act on the finding and what format that person can realistically use, then writes to it - which usually means shorter, more specific, and considerably more direct about what should change.
- Policy briefs and technical notes
- Technical reports and synthesis products
- Field learning products and practitioner guidance
- Participatory approaches for mixed crop-livestock systems
- Smallholder livestock pathway documentation
Who this is for
Veterinary services strengthening workforce capability; training institutions developing or revising curricula; development partners with capacity development components; research programmes needing communicable outputs; and regional bodies harmonising professional standards.
Common questions
Questions we are asked about this work
Do you deliver training, or design it?
Both. Some assignments are delivery, some are design for another institution to deliver, and some are assessment work that concludes training is not what the problem requires.
How is training effectiveness measured?
By change in capability at post, not by satisfaction at the end of the session. That means establishing beforehand what participants should be able to do differently, and following up at a distance to see whether they can.
Can training be delivered remotely?
Partly. Technical content transfers reasonably well; practical veterinary and laboratory skills do not. Blended designs that put theory online and reserve in-person time for practical work usually give the best return on limited budgets.
Related services
Often scoped alongside this work
Monitoring, evaluation, learning, and portfolio assessment
Independent evaluation of livestock programmes and research portfolios using OECD-DAC criteria, Quality of Science and QoR4D assessment, and fieldwork.
Read moreStart a conversation
Ready to design livestock systems that are productive, resilient, healthy, and investment-ready?
Contact Livestock Futures to discuss advisory support, project development, evaluation, capacity development, climate finance, or strategic partnerships.