Friday, March 13, 2015

Nairobi, an urban zoo? or the limits of agricultural census data

In my last post I have shown a livestock keeper in urban area. Urban agriculture is often not so widely studied, as most agricultural census data are restricted to rural area. The lack of standardized big amount of data makes it very difficult to understand the different food producing systems along the urban rural continuum.

The recently released demographic health surveys (DHS) are bringing a big change in the data availability. Because they focus on health, they cover the whole continuum from urban to rural. As they are also interested in wealth of the households, they collect lots of information about assets,  including livestock and agricultural land.

As part of the Urban Zoo project to which ILRI contributes, i have been asked to study livestock ownership within the boarders of Nairobi based on this data, with some astonishing results.

About 60% of households in poorer neighborhoods of Nairobi own livestock
The most common animal is chicken

but also dairy cow
So missing urban areas out of agricultural survey will always result in missing livestock keepers who contribute to food security.

No comments:

Post a Comment