APMD Online

Stage 1 Context · rangeland

The rangeland that feeds the herd — and the pressures on it

Everything downstream begins on the rangeland: grazing, water and animal-health conditions across Africa's pastoral and agro-pastoral systems. The drought toll is quantified in the opportunity scorecard below.

Rangeland module — feed, rules & responses

Thirty years of writing the rules of the range

National pastoral codes and regional instruments, 1995–2026.

The herd's feed base — the feed gap

The response ledger — what is already on the books

Stage 2 Production · the herd

The size of Africa's pastoral herd — and who holds it

The asset base of the whole chain. Species scope is the four pastoral animals — cattle, sheep, goats and camels. Read from the general to the specific, and pick a species or a region — every chart in the module re-scopes to your selection.

Herd module Continental · all species

Species

Region

Continental herd, by species most general

The herd, by region click a region to filter

Reacts to the species picked above.

Holders of the herd mid detail

Concentration by species most specific

Each country’s herd figure comes from its best available survey, and those years differ — Ethiopia’s, for example, is the 2022 national census. So read each country on its own, not across them as one year.

Stage 3 Movement · live trade & corridors

The herd's export earnings — and the destination of value

Live and processed animal exports, harmonised to USD. Select a country in the main chart to re-scope its growth trajectory and its destination markets. Partner detail is estimated, so the flow is shown as a signal, never as settled fact.

Export earnings module

Export value by country (USD, latest harmonised year) click a bar to cross-filter ↓

Each country’s figure is its latest harmonised year (surfaced per country) — e.g. Somalia is 2024. Years are not mixed across countries.

Growth signal

Destination concentration est.

The trade iceberg illustrative

Official records only capture formal, recorded exports — the tip. Plenty of cross-border trade moves informally, and how much varies a lot by country (Uganda ~2%, Nigeria ~60–90%). We show it country by country under “Who depends on the herd” below, not as one continental number.

The export network est.

Named trade-flow corridors Estimate

The routes animals actually move on — Horn→Gulf, Sahel→coastal West Africa. Carried in the hub as 22 trade-flow corridors with indicative flow magnitudes; informal-trade share is not recorded as a percentage. These are the flow-magnitude corridors — distinct from the 14 geolocated map corridors drawn on the pastoral-trade map below (same concept, two different data cuts).

Stage 4 The missing middle · processing & value-add

Value capture and loss along the chain

Between the farmgate and the export price sits processing — slaughter, dairy, hides, chilled meat. This is where margin is made, and it is the thinnest-measured stage in the hub: the only price point that actually exists is the farmgate. That absence is itself the finding — the largest investable white space in the chain.

Recorded market infrastructure, by country

Stage 5 Distribution · markets

The marketplaces where animals meet buyers

The physical geography of pastoral trade — the cross-border corridors animals move along, and the border posts, ports and market destinations they pass through. A thin but expressive layer: it shows where the formal marketplace exists on the ground.

The pastoral-trade map — corridors, border posts & markets located · mostly gazetteer coords

Show

Stage 7 The case · economic contribution & finance

Livestock's weight in the national economy

Livestock's share of GDP — decomposed. Each bar is a country's whole economy (GDP = 100%): the green band is agriculture's share of GDP, and the dark band nested inside it is livestock's share of national GDP. Read together, the two bands show how much of the agricultural economy rests on animals. The leaders rest up to ~18% of their entire economy on livestock; most sit in the mid-to-high single digits.

Livestock as a share of GDP

livestock (% of national GDP) rest of agriculture GDP rest of GDP (non-agriculture) agriculture budget (silver bar, % of national budget) livestock budget (gold bar, % of national budget)

Where livestock's share of GDP falls, across the twelve

0%25%50%75%100%

These 12 countries carry all three figures — national GDP, agriculture % of GDP and livestock % of national GDP — drawn from World Bank WDI and national statistics offices (2026 figure round). About 40 other member states have GDP and agriculture but no livestock share on record yet, so they are held out rather than estimated. The median of these sits at , the leader at .

Why the dark band may not match the reported “% of ag GDP”. The band's length is each country's confirmed livestock % of national GDP. Its fraction of the green agriculture band is therefore only an approximation of the separately-reported livestock share of agricultural GDP — the two can differ because the figures use different sources, years or definitions (narrow national-accounts value-added vs the broad livestock value chain). Divergences are logged for the country steward to reconcile.

The thin bars beneath — what is actually budgeted. On the four bars with a trusted national-budget figure (Mauritania, Niger, Tanzania, Uganda), a silver bar (agriculture sector) and a gold bar (livestock) are attached under the main bar on the same scale, each a share of the total national budget. They are tiny stubs next to the contribution bands above — livestock is funded at roughly 0.4–1.5% of the budget while worth 4–10% of GDP in those countries. Contribution (share of GDP) and allocation (share of budget) use different denominators, so they are read together as what the sector earns versus what it is funded, not as one number. The other eight bars carry no allocation bar — their livestock budget figure is not yet from a primary national-budget source.

Stage 7 · b The human & economic weight

The people who depend on the herd — livelihoods & the wider economy

Beyond the animals: the people who herd them, the households that live off them, and livestock's weight in the national economy. Newly surfaced from the national briefs.

Pastoral population est.

Persons living in pastoral systems — representative estimate; sources often differ (see table).

Livestock in the national economy est.

Absolute livestock GDP (USD) where reported — a companion to the livestock-%-of-GDP figure above.

Household dependence on livestock est.

Share of household income from livestock (bars). The table also carries agriculture's employment share and livestock-keeping household counts.

Informal cross-border trade est.

Informal share of cross-border livestock trade, where national briefs estimate it — highly country-specific (fills the trade-iceberg's “submerged” unknown).

Capstone Synthesis · opportunity scorecard

The investable opportunities — and the strength of the evidence

Every reading on this page, ranked by what the data can actually support today. Score = market signal × evidence strength (max 25) — the matrix below plots both, so a high-signal but thin-evidence story (single-buyer risk, corridors) is visibly demoted, not promoted on signal alone. Sort any column, filter by who the opportunity is for, and click any row — or any point on the matrix to expand its evidence, a market-signal chart, and links into the knowledge library.

The ranking method — score = market signal × evidence strength (max 25)

Y ↑ Market signal (1–5)

How large and investable the opportunity is — the size of the underlying metric (head, export value, GDP share, drought toll, reach), how siteable it is on the ground, and how sharp the direction. Read straight off the charts higher on this page.

X → Evidence strength (1–5)

How far the hub's own data can carry the claim today — from broad, well-sourced coverage (5), through estimated or single-source (2–3), down to named-only with almost no data (1, a data gap).

For

#	Opportunity	Score	Grade

Ranks 1–4 (score ≥20) are well-evidenced and buildable now. Ranks 5–7 are real but narrow or estimated. Ranks 8–10 score low because the evidence isn’t in the hub yet — roadmap items, not today’s opportunities.

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African Union · AU-IBAR

Africa's Pastoral-livestock Value-chain Story