By Roy Behnke and Margaret Nakirya

IGAD LPI Working Paper No. 02 – 12

This is the fifth in a series of reports on the contribution of livestock to the economies of the IGAD member states. Building on methodologies developed in earlier studies of the role of livestock in the economies of Ethiopia, Kenya and Sudan, the present report undertakes an assessment of the contribution of livestock to Uganda’s national economy. Conventional GDP accounting may ignore some of the benefits that people derive from livestock in subsistence oriented economies, when households directly provision themselves, when economic exchanges are not calculated in monetary terms or when these exchanges go unrecorded.

The present study assigns monetary values to the non-marketed goods and services provided by livestock, and estimates the contribution of livestock to the wider national economy – as exports, as inputs into manufacturing industries, and as a component of household consumption.