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Net Commercial Offtake
Net commercial off take at the community (or wider) scale refers to the net sales from that community or region. It focuses on the number of animals being bought and sold and not on animal by-products (like milk or eggs).
How to operationalize the metric
Method of data collection and data needed to compute the method:
Data on sales and purchases from a household survey can be used to calculate net commercial offtake for a community or region, as described in Asfaw and Jabbar (2008) for Ethiopia. For details on survey questions for this, see the Animal Product indicator above. The formula is as follows:
Net commercial offtake = (Total population / sampled population) * Ʃ (Sales – Purchases) / (0.5*(Opening stock + Ending stock))
Where Ʃ represents the sum of all randomly sampled individuals surveyed for a given community or region. If a stratified sampling strategy is used the sampling weights should be used instead of the first term (Total population / sampled population).
Unit of analysis:
The unit of analysis is household.
Limitations regarding estimating and interpreting:
Livestock ownership is not evenly distributed among households and so there may be high standard errors unless a multi-stage sampling design is used to target households that own livestock.
Method of data collection and data needed to compute the method:
It is often possible to obtain some estimate of the total number of animals imported or exported from an administrative region, such as a district or province. Government record keeping on the movement of livestock varies widely from one country to another. One promising example is that the Tanzanian Ministry of Industry and Trade has established market information systems in 53 markets across the country collecting price and quantities of animals sold (Mapunda et al. 2011).
Unit of analysis:
The unit of analysis is region.
Limitations regarding estimating and interpreting:
Regional figures may not capture all of the livestock trading that is being carried out.
Shortcomings regarding estimation and interpretation of the indicator
Smallholder farmers value livestock for uses beyond its productivity. In many contexts, farmers rely on livestock for savings, insurance, social prestige, and cultural functions (Dorward et al., 2005), which are beyond the production metrics listed. This needs to be considered when evaluating SI technologies. The savings and insurance uses relate to risk and reducing consumption variability, which in turn relates to the economic domain. The social prestige use of livestock could be detected through participatory wealth ranking (described in the economic domain). Cultural functions of livestock may be assessed through the social cohesion indicator in the social domain. Detailed methods for implementing a “Species by Function Matrix” and a “Function Priority and Preliminary Indicator Matrix” are provided in Dorward et al. (2005).