Overview of the approach

The Animal Health Loss Envelope (AHLE), which represents the farm level disease burden, is the difference in income from livestock populations under the current state of health and under an idealized perfect health situation where there are no health or nutritional problems (such as disease, predation, acute feed shortage or micronutrient deficiency).

The flow of inputs and outputs under the current state of health and the ideal is represented in the conceptual flow below.

The AHLE for Ethiopia was calculated using gross margin as a measure of income, which was simulated using a herd dynamics model. This was attributed to infectious, non-infectious, and external causes based on expert elicitation. See the following pages for an overview of the compartmental herd model and the attribution methodology.

Fig. 3 Conceptual flow of inputs, outputs, and production losses