Stakeholder perceptions of One Health in a pastoralist context

What is it about?

"One Health" is an approach to tackling health and sustainability challenges that recognizes the deep connections between human health, animal health, and the environment. Although the idea is widely embraced, putting it into practice has proven difficult. One reason is that and different groups of people think about health in fundamentally different ways. In this study, we worked with communities, health workers, veterinarians, environmental officials, and NGOs in Turkana County, Kenya, a pastoralist region facing significant health and environmental challenges, to map out how each group understands the health system around them. We used a technique called fuzzy cognitive mapping, where participants draw diagrams showing relationships between factors, combined with in-depth qualitative analysis. By comparing these maps across groups, we identified where perspectives overlapped and where they diverged, and what those differences mean for making One Health work in practice.

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Photo by Imani Manyara on Unsplash

Photo by Imani Manyara on Unsplash

Why is it important?

One Health initiatives often struggle not because of a lack of resources or political will, but because the people involved don't share the same mental model of the problem. Our study shows this concretely: while all groups agreed that human health, livestock health, and nutrition are important, they differed sharply in how they understood causes, connections, and solutions. Environmental actors emphasized human-driven ecological degradation, while community members described traditional medicine and wild foods as central to health and well-being. These gaps matter. When planners and communities don't share the same picture of how the system works, interventions can miss the mark, exclude important knowledge, or inadvertently undermine local adaptive capacity.

Perspectives