Village Chicken Production Constraints and Opportunities in Western Zone of Tigray, Northern Ethiopia

The survey was aimed at assessing village chicken production opportunities and constraints in western zone of Tigray. Multi stage sampling produres were employed to select weredas, sample kebeles and respondents in which three rural weredas were selected by purposive sampling technique; stratified purposive techniques were employed to select nine sample kebeles and purposive random sampling techniques were used to select a total of 385 respondents. Pretested well –structured questionnaire and focused group discussion were employed to generate data. Household characteristics were analyzed using descriptive statistics of SPSS 16. Kruskal- Wall’s test option of Non-parametric tests of SPSS 16 was employed to test proportion difference of each variable among the altitudes. Ranking index was employed to rank both identified constraints and common poultry diseases. Disease (1st) and predators (2nd) were the major village chicken production constraints. Newcastle disease (1st), fowl salmonella (2nd), coccidiosis (3rd), fowl typhoid (4th), fowl cholera (5th), fowl pox (6th) and fowl coryza (7th) were the major and economically important diseases that hinder the expansion of village chicken production in the study area. On the other hand, market access, feed access, drinking water access, and diversified agro- ecological zones of the study area and ease management of village chicken were the identified opportunities of village chicken production. Chickens are considered as movable poor man’s bank because of Ease management of village chicken and their short reproduction cycles. Therefore, technical and institutional interventions are very imperative to lessen the prevailing constraints together with designing, planning and implementing community based and agro-ecologically friendly holistic breeding and production improvement programmes in order to ensure sustainable improvement, utilization and conservation of the identified opportunities and the indigenous chicken genetic resources as whole. Key Words: Constraints, Opportunities, Movable poor man’s bank, Western Zone of Tigra