Sms Based System to Provide Cattle Health Care Information in Mandera County

Abstract

Background: The livestock sector in Mandera County provides livelihoods for majority of the residents who are mostly small-scale livestock producers. Not only is it a key source of food and nutritional refuge for consumers but also acts as ―mobile bank‖ to provide security during droughts (Waithera 2011). This implies that fighting livestock disease is an inevitable task and a big headache to this marginalized community. However, veterinary services provided by the government rarely go beyond vaccination in these areas implying least accessibility (Leyland et al. 2014). The livestock producers are experienced in disease diagnosis and treatment using indigenous knowledge and ethno-veterinary medicines but are not knowledgeable in determining dosage rates, way of administration and quality of the available veterinary pharmaceuticals (Munyua, Farrah and Kahiu 1999). Despite this, mobile applications has been espoused to lower healthcare costs and improve its quality of healthcare as well as shift behavior to strengthen prevention, all of which can improve health outcomes over the long term (Anand and Srivatsa 2014, Qiang et al. 2011). Objectives: to determine the system needs, to determine the potential of SMS in facilitating access to livestock health information as well as to develop and deploy a working prototype of SMS based livestock health Information system and a database with information livestock symptoms and treatment. Methodology: The design of this system followed the Systems Development Life Cycle. The study sampled 17 livestock keepers at each Sub-county (system users) and 10 Ministry of Livestock staff and veterinary doctors (3 public and 2 private) who were the stakeholders at Mandera County while usability testing targeted 50 system users. Systems requirements, design considerations and usability were obtained from interviews and questionnaires with stakeholders and users respectively. Quantitative data was analyzed using SPSS version 20 while qualitative data was analyzed through content analysis. From pre-study findings, majority (90.7%) owned a mobile phone (93.2% basic phones) although 74.2% had no formal education. Animals kept by sometimes fell sick but 48.5% of them administered drugs from agro vets without consulting veterinary doctors because of their inaccessibility both in terms of unaffordability, geographical distance and unavailability. Although all were willing to use their phones to access animal health information especially in Somali language, none of them had used it before. Results: The prototype developed being user initiated system was appropriate for the type of phones owned by the livestock keepers since it aided them to access animal health information. The system usability testing indicated that the users were elated by the system interaction, speed, language, clarity and accuracy. Recommendation: As livestock keepers tend to administer drugs from agro vets directly without consulting veterinary doctors posing a great danger to their animals, there is need of scaling up of such prototypes to increase accessibility of expert animal health information to the livestock keepers.