Resilience Strategies to Poultry Farming Threats among the Urban Based Small Scale Poultry Farmers in Dar es Salaam, 2020.

Abstract

Despite the importance of poultry farming in an urban setting and efforts to improve the subsector, farmers continue to face various farming threats that retard the production. This paper assessed the urban-based poultry farmers’ capacity to cope with the farming threats and recommended strategies for strengthening farmers’ capacities to more competently cope with the threats. Based on the multi-layered social resilience framework, a qualitative approach was utilized drawing on 50 in-depth interviews, three FGDs, a series of observations and a review of secondary data. Accordingly, on the one hand, farmers managed to develop both reactive and proactive capacities to cope with the threats mainly at individual and community levels and less capacity from other social levels. Although some farmers managed to cope with poultry keeping threats, some of them experienced unsuccessful coping due to inadequate relevant knowledge and skills, higher feeds prices, limited social network and unreliable extension services. To increase farmers’ resilience to the threats, several factors should be addressed notably; equipping farmers with relevant knowledge and skills, ensuring the availability of adequate knowledgeable, extension officers in each ward to facilitate the accessibility of market and extension services by the poultry farmers. Moreover, farmers should be facilitated to form meaningful social networks that enable them to access good poultry markets as well as an extension of financial and technical support to farmers and ultimately ensuring that these initiatives are reflected in the government policies and by-laws. These findings shed light on alternative ways of alleviating the negative consequences of farming threats among urban-based poultry farmers and other urban residents.