The Goat Effect by Anna

The Goat Effect by Anna - March 2014 Scholarship Essay

I didn’t plan to write my undergraduate Public Policy honor’s thesis on goats. I intended to write on a much loftier global health topic such as HIV/AIDS or the relationship between conflict and health. Although my thesis touched on these topics, it was the peculiar centerpiece of the paper, the goats, that captured my attention. In this unlikely academic achievement, I found my passion and my future career in global health monitoring and evaluation.

My research evaluated a goat-lending program managed by Health Alert Uganda (HAU), a support organization for children infected with or affected by HIV/AIDS in Northern Uganda. The program was designed both to mitigate the economic repercussions of HIV/AIDS for the families and increase accessibility to treatment and care. HAU lent a mother goat to a family until the goat had a kid, and then it was passed onto the next family. The families kept the kids and could raise them to sell, breed more goats or butcher for meat. The loan was complemented with periodic visits from the HAU counselors to check in on the families and their health needs. I found this particular program interesting because it targeted the underlying causes of disease including economic instability, rather than simply treating the disease’s symptoms. In an area still recovering from decades of civil war, both extreme poverty and HIV/AIDS are more prevalent in Northern Uganda than in the rest of the country, making the intervention particularly salient for the community.

My favorite part of the research was interviewing the program participants to learn about their experiences. My conversations with the families were eye opening, not just regarding the program, but also for me to learn about research in developing countries and to understand what it means to live in extreme poverty. For example, I found that what I thought would be one of the simplest background questions to answer, “How many children do you have?” was actually one of the most difficult. While this question would rarely take a second thought to answer in the United States, in these communities the translators would speak to the families for about five minutes before giving me an answer. Should they count children whom were orphaned by relatives and they now look after? What about children who have passed away? One child is sick, and so she lives with family nearer to town so that she can more easily receive medication; should she be included? I learned how to ask better interview questions through these exchanges, but also learned about the challenges the families faced daily. I saw how the HIV/AIDS epidemic had ravaged their communities and extreme poverty limited their ability to break the cycle of disease.

After completing the interviews and analyzing the resulting data, I found that the goat lending intervention was not fulfilling its goals as intended. Though an innovative idea, goats make for troubling micro-loans because they are easily susceptible to theft, disease, or as I found in one case, being eaten by a cobra. While these results were interesting from a purely academic perspective, they were also instrumental for HAU. I was able help the organization identify the strengths and weaknesses of the program so that it could be improved. This practical application to my research allowed me to shape the program and consequently affect the future health of the community.

I learned so much from the experience, from trivial facts on the goat life cycle to the Ugandan educational system. One of my biggest takeaways however, was the importance of monitoring and evaluation to global health and international development in general. Far more extensive public health interventions than the goat-lending project have gone terribly wrong in the developing world. In some cases, the interventions are just not as effective as hoped, but in others the interventions can actually actively harm the populations they intend to help. Only through careful monitoring and evaluation of these programs can we collectively learn from mistakes and identify best practices to improve them in the future.

My experience in Uganda has encouraged me to pursue a graduate degree in public health so that I can learn more about the cultural contexts, health background and research methods necessary to effectively monitor and evaluate global health programs. I hope that this skill set will enable me to not only personally learn more about global health, but also to contribute to the body of knowledge so that as a global community, we can more effectively improve the lives of others through public health. In my future studies and career, I hope to continue to pursue my passion for global health evaluation that began in a Ugandan town with goats.