Jinka University used Evidano to theme six focus groups on veterinary service gaps in southern Ethiopia

Ethiopia has the largest livestock population in Africa, yet veterinary services in remote rural areas remain thin. In Aari Zone, which was part of South Omo Zone until 2023, mixed crop-livestock farming underpins household income, food security, and cultural life, but there was no community-level evidence on how people actually access animal health care.

The research team set out to fill that gap with a community-engaged design. Community representatives helped identify veterinary service gaps as the priority problem, shaped the research questions, and later validated the findings. The article was published open access in Veterinary Medicine and Science.

Using multistage cluster sampling, the team covered all four districts of the zone: Baka Dawla Aari, Debub Aari, Semen Aari, and Woba Aari. Six semi-structured focus groups brought together 54 adults, 38 men and 16 women, most in their 30s and 40s and responsible for livestock decisions in their households.

Discussions were held in Amharic, lasted 90 to 120 minutes, and took place in familiar community venues at times participants chose. Facilitators managed group dynamics to stop elders or local leaders from dominating. Field notes and debriefs were translated into English and triangulated with district office reports and published literature.

The analysis followed Braun and Clarke’s reflexive thematic analysis, moving from familiarization and open coding through candidate themes to a final thematic structure. The paper reports that themes, sub-themes, and codes, together with a word cloud and word-cloud bar chart, were generated using ATLAS.ti 9.1.3.0 and Evidano.

Interpretation stayed with the research team. The veterinarians who facilitated the groups translated, triangulated, and analyzed the material, and the final themes were taken back to community representatives for validation.

Availability and accessibility: one professional could be responsible for 21 development groups, services stopped whenever that person was called to meetings or training, some villages were four hours from care, cattle crushes and animal health posts were unevenly distributed, and night-time emergency care was almost non-existent.

Quality and resources: drug and vaccine deliveries were irregular, there were no laboratory or pregnancy-diagnosis services, communities asked for better-trained staff, and female professionals faced gender-specific challenges.

Economic and cultural factors: farmers paid high and often unreceipted prices at private pharmacies, forage shortages and poverty limited preventive care, and traditional remedies filled gaps when modern services failed. Notably, every group said cultural beliefs were not a barrier to modern veterinary care; decisions were driven by availability and quality.

The authors call for workforce stabilization, mobile veterinary units, diagnostic capacity, gender-sensitive training, affordability measures, and integration with farmer training centres under One Health principles.

This case shows Evidano supporting focus-group research in a low-resource, multilingual field setting. Translated discussion records from six groups across four districts were organized into a three-level structure of themes, sub-themes, and codes that the team could check against field notes and administrative data.

For animal health, agricultural extension, and One Health teams, it illustrates how a small research group can turn community discussions into structured, policy-ready evidence while keeping community validation in the loop.

The authors note that the study was community-engaged but did not meet full community-based participatory research standards for co-design and co-analysis. Focus groups may underrepresent sensitive or private issues, and translation from Amharic may have lost some nuance, although quoted passages were back-checked.

Findings are specific to Aari Zone and may not capture the most remote or mobile households. Evidano was one of two analysis tools named in the methods, and the paper does not separate their individual contributions.