What are Livestock Indicators?

Abstract

In the development community indicator is a term more frequently used than 'statistic', as it attracts more attention from potential users, including decision-makers and the media. Indicators transform and communicate data. Data are pieces of information that are either directly observed and collected (primary data) or retrieved from other sources (secondary data), and then processed through appropriate methodologies to produce indicators. Simple indicators are aggregations of data standardized by some time, space, and or other dimensions. Examples for livestock include the number of cattle in a country on a given day; the average number of animals affected by a disease in a given country each year; or the value of live animals exported from a country in a given year. Livestock-related indicators are used for a range of purposes, including analyses of sectors' or value chains' performance, monitoring and evaluation of interventions in the form of policies, programs and projects, and comparisons between countries and sectors. Decision-makers look at indicators from three main perspectives: level of the indicator, showing its status; dispersion or concentration of the indicator, which represents the variability of its status; and trends in the indicator over time, space, or other progressions relevant to the decision being made.