Health and demographic surveillance in Sahelian mobile livestock production systems

Summary Mobile pastoralists in the Sahel, i.e. people who depend on a livestock production system and follow their herds as they move, remain almost completely excluded from health services. A plausible reason why they are underrepresented in national censuses and/or alternative sequential sample survey systems is that mobile people are hard to reach and stay in contact with. Due to the lack of monitoring and inadequate information systems, demographic and health related data of mobile pastoralists of sub-Saharan Africa are scarce. Accurate population statistics and cost-effective registration systems are the basis for evidence-based policies and effective new strategies to provide adapted, integrated, and sustainable social services for mobile pastoralist people in remote zones. Mobile livestock production systems need to be fostered to strengthen their role as conservators of semi-arid ecosystems and main producers of pastoral products that are contributing significantly to the gross domestic product and food provision of their countries. Currently, the range of demographic and health surveillance methods, tools and approaches is limited to settled households and hardly applicable in mobile populations. New evaluation and monitoring methods, approaches, and tools to survey mobile households are needed. Preventive measures (the joint human and animal vaccination program, in the Lake Chad area, provided by the Swiss Tropical Institute and the Centre de Support en Santé Internationale in Chad from 2000 to 2007) have been implemented on small scale and need to be evaluated and scaled up towards an equity effective health intervention. Therefore, estimates on population sizes and other demographic core indices like mortality and fertility in these highly mobile pastoralists’ settings have to be assessed, making demographic and health information surveillance indispensable. The study presented here, was carried out at the southern shores of Lake Chad in Chari-Baguirmi, Chad. In five random household survey rounds ...