How Africa Can (and Must) Skip the 30-Year Animal Welfare Evolution

TLDR: The animal welfare movement in Africa has made significant progress over the last 5 years, but due to increasing commercialisation of animals on the continent and foreign interest in animal agriculture, now more than ever, it needs to accelerate. Our retrospective look at Europe's trajectory shows that reform did not stem from a gradual shift in attitudes. Instead, it was sparked by interconnected events over about 20 to 30 years. Events like public health and food safety crises involving animals fueled advocacy groups. These events led to policy wins and a change in the retail market. We think Africa can compress this timeline to 5–10 years by: actively and strategically pushing for institutional and policy recognition now rather than waiting for organic growth in public demand, capitalizing on non-animal welfare framing, recruiting mid-to-late career professionals now while focusing on education of early-to-mid career professionals, and, building strategic partnerships with universities, government agencies, and industry bodies to embed welfare into curricula, regulation, and market standards.

Introduction

In our work, we routinely reflect on the status and ongoing development of Africa’s animal welfare movement. In this, we have seen how small actions can lead to big wins for animals across the continent. There is no doubt that the African movement has seen progress over the last 5 years, such as cage-free wins in 2024 that more than doubled in 2025. Considering where the movement was a decade ago, these feats are incredible. However, due to the vastness of systemic cruelty across our continent, "incredible" just doesn't feel enough. The scale of suffering demands more than just incremental steps. It demands a radical rethink of our strategy and development of counterfactuals at the continental level. And so, naturally, reviewing how this was done in other regions could provide insight. Of particular interest was the European animal welfare journey. While Europe still has animal welfare concerns, there is no doubt they’ve come a long way. We found that Europe’s progress wasn't a slow walk of "changing hearts and minds". We noticed a cascade of events triggered by shocks to the existing system at the time. While this might be obvious to insiders, it is important to summarize these developments and glean from them as we look to redefine our approach to an even more impactful animal welfare movement in Africa.

Europe’s shift from limited farm animal protections to comprehensive, legally binding welfare standards took roughly 20 to 30 years of sustained pressure, resulting in milestones along a timeline, including various significant policy developments and reforms. Below sets out some of the key policy developments that occurred within Europe: 

• 1974: Council Directive 74/577/EEC on stunning animals before slaughter.
• 1986: The EU adopted its first farm animal welfare rules.
• 1991: The EU adopted Council Directives on the protection of calves and then pigs
• 1997: The EU formally recognized animals as sentient beings in a protocol attached to the Treaty of Amsterdam. This gave animal welfare constitutional status in EU policymaking.
• 1998: The Council Directive 98/58/EC set minimum welfare standards for all animals kept for farming. It applied across species used for food, wool, skin, fur, and other agricultural purposes.
• 1999: Council Directive 1999/74/EC mandated the phase-out of conventional battery cages by 2012 and introduced enriched cage standards.
• 2008: Council Directive 2008/120/EC laying down minimum standards for the protection of pigs
• 2012: The ban on conventional battery cages becomes mandatory across the EU.

Where the Analogy Holds, and Where It Breaks Down

Before drawing lessons from Europe, we want to point out where the comparison between Europe and Africa holds and where it does not. Africa, in 2026, is different from the Europe of the 1990s. First, compared to Africa, institutions in Europe then were strongly integrated, with major welfare wins coming from legally binding directives that EU member states were obliged to transpose into national law, with a European Court of Justice procedure for enforcing their compliance. Today, Africa has no similar institutions mandated to create and enforce directives. Decisions made by the African Union are largely political commitments and non-binding, often left at the discretion of individual member countries. This means welfare reforms in Africa will likely have to proceed country-by-country (as is practiced already) rather than by top-down compulsion at the continental level. Second, the economic conditions facing African consumers today differ significantly from those faced by Europeans 20-30 years ago. Food affordability across Africa currently remains a daily pressure (about 20% of the population facing malnutrition), hence, welfare reforms that raise production costs even marginally might struggle to succeed. Third is the production structure in Africa. Despite a growing animal agriculture industry with differing levels of intensification, the majority of Africa's livestock are reared in smallholder, informal, or backyard systems. This creates a dualistic approach of both shaping a growing informal sector with due regard to animal welfare and meeting current needs, while dismantling institutional cruelty in more developed systems. Similarly, while certain African countries have formalised and strong retail industries, food retail largely consists of informal markets, wet markets, and fragmented trading networks. This also means the “retail acceptance” phase of the EU model would differ from the requirements for change in Africa.

Despite these differences, what we think transfers is the causal sequence and not the contexts themselves. Europe's progress was driven by interrelated events we describe below. These events could be triggered by conditions that already exist across Africa. What this means is that the path Africa should take will be different from Europe's, but, if planned well, it can be faster. Africa has the benefit of hindsight, a shorter institutional ladder to climb in some individual countries, and the chance to intervene before/while the worst forms of factory farms become entrenched. This stems from significant investments into agriculture by significantly funded entities, including The World Bank and big meat companies investing into the continent, for instance, JBS looking to establish a major factory farm in Nigeria.

How the Change Started in Europe

Animal welfare reforms across Europe were accelerated in interconnected phases, summarised in the following three parts:

1. The Crisis Trigger (1990–2009): From what we could gather, the biggest accelerants were the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), also known as the “mad cow disease” crisis, and the 2009 Swine flu pandemic. BSE resulted in the culling of over 4 million cattle in the United Kingdom (UK). Later, the UK government confirmed a link between BSE and Creutzfeldt–Jakob, a disease that took the lives of over 170 people. The 2009 swine flu pandemic infected over 125,550 people across Europe, killing over 900 people and costing the UK alone over £1.2 billion. These crises led to massive public distrust of industrial livestock systems across affected member states. Other crises like the 2001 Foot and Mouth outbreak in the UK, which led to the culling of over 6 million cows and sheep, and the 1999 dioxin contamination that resulted in the slaughter of about 7 million chickens and 60,000 pigs. These prompted immediate, massive, and global bans on food products, directly affecting both external and internal consumers and a decline in food safety. The public, now forced to confront the industry, its actions and the harms to animals and humans, could not escape an uncomfortable reality that: while animals are consumed, their welfare is intertwined with food safety.
2. Institutionalization of Advocacy Groups (1997–2002): Growth of investigative media and NGO campaigns, along with the expansion of professional animal advocacy in Europe, kicked off. For example, in 1996, several welfare groups across Europe urged citizens to write to Members of the European Parliament calling for a ban on battery cages. Animal welfare became embedded in EU governance: the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty formally recognized animals as sentient beings in EU law.  Compassion in World Farming quickly scaled campaigns in the UK and EU prior to a 1999 meeting of EU agriculture ministers, including mass postcard campaigns directed at ministers and policymakers. Animal welfare investigations received national TV coverage, and graphic documentation of battery cages and veal crates demonstrated the cruelty of intensive confinement, which quickly became widely distributed. General animal welfare standards were set, and the Council Directive began the phase-out of battery cages. What happened was that governments codified welfare in law, further increasing public concern. Policy always signals legitimacy. This legitimacy reinforces social norms, especially as citizens' income starts to rise. Eurobarometer trend data showed that >80% EU member states consistently reported higher welfare concerns at the time. Eventually, there was a shift from concerns like food quantity toward post-materialist values, including ethical and quality concerns, and animal welfare fits this pattern.
3. Retail acceptance: Supermarkets began differentiating products based on welfare claims. Retailers introduced free-range and higher-welfare lines. Labelling schemes expanded across Europe quickly. Welfare became a visible market category, raised even more public awareness, and introduced a choice architecture that ultimately further reinforced moral framing. By 2012, what began as a crisis-driven reaction had become a permanent structural change across the entire European industry.

In short, the crises exposed systemic risks of industrialized animal agriculture that forced the EU to institutionalize animal welfare in treaties and directives. Animal welfare advocates quickly professionalized in response and used media strategically, with retailers normalizing animal welfare as a purchasing category.

How Africa Can Skip This

The biggest lesson from Europe is that public concern and institutional change co-evolved. Welfare concerns scaled because crises, advocacy, policy, and markets reinforced each other, not because attitudes slowly shifted on their own. For African advocates, this means we do not have to wait for public demand to crystallize before acting. Drawing on roughly eight years of on-the-ground experience across the continent, we propose the following contributions to a strategic framework. These are our views, not those of any organisation. We argue that animal welfare concerns can scale faster across Africa when we:

1. Coordinate among non-profit actors: First, we must not treat low public concern as a reason to delay institutional engagement. In many African countries, animal welfare is secondary to issues like food security, employment, and economic growth. But this was also true in Europe before reforms began. What changed the trajectory was aggressive pushes by advocates and the public for institutional recognition. Once governments were forced to start embedding animal welfare into treaties and directives, animal welfare concerns gained legitimacy. We (advocates in Africa) have the potential to act at this level. Through coordinating efforts on exploiting strategic pressure points, we can increasingly push for the inclusion of pro-animal welfare language into policies, including legislation, regulations, and other agricultural development strategies and reforms. We can work with lawmakers to develop model standards that are practical and context-appropriate. This means holding authorities accountable where such developments do not reflect accuracy towards the realities of how animals are treated. An example of this is the campaign launched against the African Organisation for Standardisation (ARSO) draft standard (CD-ARS 1241). A joint letter, initiated by Animal Law Reform South Africa and Compassion in World Farming and signed by an additional 33 civil society and non-profit organisations, forced ARSO and its 44 member country standard bodies to reconsider their draft standards for battery cages. This joint letter emphasized the false claim that "The laying hen cage system has become the most important facility as it guarantees the welfare of birds while laying", calling for its removal, among other issues related to animal welfare and the African industry. This initiative demonstrated the collective stance by African organisations against the cruelty of battery cages on the continent. As it stands, the standards have not been published.
2. Capitalize on non-animal welfare framing: Animal welfare has to be a central part of a broader conversation about safety, transparency, and trust in the African food system. Africa already faces significant challenges in farmed animal production. Disease outbreaks, weak biosecurity, antimicrobial misuse, and informal market structures create real risks for producers and consumers. Further, environmental issues and their impacts, including water shortages (which plague many African countries), droughts, flooding, and the growing reality of the climate crisis, also present leverage points for animal welfare framing. While these issues are widespread, animal advocates often work exclusively on animal protection and do not capitalize on them fully. Major food supply and safety crises are prominent in Africa, including listeriosis outbreaks, major highly pathogenic avian influenza outbreaks, and Foot-and-Mouth disease, among others. Welfare improvements reduce stress in animals, lower disease transmission, improve productivity, and strengthen resilience in supply chains. When presented this way, welfare is no longer seen as a foreign ethical luxury. It becomes a practical tool for improving agricultural performance. Leveraging this, we can embed animal welfare into institutions by linking it to food safety and economic resilience, laying a strong foundation for faster change. A key example illustrating this strategy is the recent initiative by Sustainable Health and Resilient Environments for Development (SHARED). Through direct and focused engagement with the Ministry of Fisheries and Aquaculture and the Fisheries Commission, SHARED successfully secured a governmental agreement to broaden the regulatory scope of Ghana’s Fisheries and Aquaculture Act, 2025 (Act 1146). Crucially, this expansion allowed SHARED to push for the inclusion of aquaculture welfare standards within the implementing regulations of the Act.
3. Increase Talent and Growth: There are incredible advocates leading animal welfare strategies across Africa. Their dedication and existing efforts form a vital, foundational movement. The scale of animal suffering and the systemic challenges involved, however, vastly outstrip the current capacity of our professional workforce. We do not have nearly enough established talent to tackle the endemic and widespread nature of this problem effectively. We believe that the movement needs an injection of talent, specifically mid-to-late career professionals in the near-term. These individuals represent a high-value resource, bringing with them a wealth of transferable skills, established professional networks, career capital, and significant institutional credibility earned in other fields. They can fast-track research agendas, policy work, and institutional buy-in with less salary cost relative to global north advocates and more marginal impact than entry-level counterparts. Examples could look like: university faculty pivoting to animal welfare research, veterinary leaders embedding welfare into curricula, and agribusiness leaders advocating standards and running corporate campaigns. Animal Advocacy Africa is already doing an incredible job at this. We do concede that we need people who care about animal welfare and value systems of EA within institutions to build political power and alliances across sectors in the long-run. This should be coupled with education and opportunities for early-to-mid-career professionals to advance within the animal protection movement in Africa.
4. Collaborate with Institutions: Current advocacy in Africa is predominantly NGO-only efforts with very small teams. While occurring in certain respects, we propose enhancing active institutional collaborations. For instance, through partnering with the Ghana National Poultry Association, Animal Welfare League hosted workshops across all the major poultry-producing regions of Ghana that resulted in the establishment of cage-free directories in Ghana, South Africa, Egypt, and Morocco. Another is the partnership between the African Union Inter-African Bureau for Animal Resources (AU-IBAR) and the Africa Network for Animal Welfare (ANAW), jointly co-hosting 9 editions of the Africa Animal Welfare Conference, aligning stakeholders and supporting the implementation of a framework designed to improve standards in livestock farming, wildlife management, and animal protection across Africa. In South Africa, Animal Law Reform South Africa established courses on animal law and the rights of nature at the University of Johannesburg and the University of the Western Cape. Engaging universities to ensure that animal welfare is taught across professions that are linked to animal protection across the continent is crucial. When future veterinarians, regulators, and agribusiness leaders encounter welfare principles during their training, those principles will more appropriately be analysed and contemplated in the classroom (and in workshops), leading to their normalisation within the sector. With time, this shapes how industries operate and brings into consideration animal welfare during decision-making. Institutions amplify the reach and credibility that would otherwise take several years for NGOs to achieve by themselves. Engagement with government agencies creates policy traction much faster than NGO-only advocacy. As such, we recommend strategically focused identification of crucial areas where animal welfare concerns overlap significantly with broader public health and environmental imperatives that are more popular among the general public and governments. Through concentrating on these points of intersection, advocates can effectively engage directly with governmental bodies to achieve tangible, policy-level changes that improve the lives of farmed animals. AWeCCA in Uganda, who are leveraging its university connections to lobby the Ugandan government to curb industrial animal agriculture, exemplifies this. When we work within the existing priorities, legal frameworks, and administrative systems that influence governmental decision-making, we can maximize our impact for animals.
5. Other Considerations: This article merely sets out some contributions towards building a stronger movement in Africa. For this purpose, we recommend further exploration of the following (and others):

• Consideration of animal welfare in relation to environmental protection, human rights (including the right to access information, corporate responsibilities towards consumers, environmental rights, employee rights)
• Consideration of African religious beliefs, cultures, and traditions with respect to animal welfare
• Investing in tailored African research outputs and increasing the evidence base on the continent
• Investing in think (and do) tanks on steering policy strategies and overarching guidance for the movement

Conclusion

Europe's economic and political structure differs considerably from Africa’s, but its trajectory still offers an instructive pattern. A pattern that indicates that meaningful, large-scale animal welfare reform does not require decades of gradual attitude change. We (Africa) have an opportunity to replicate a much shorter version of this timeline with the advantage of learning from it and acting in a coordinated and strategic manner. The scale of animal suffering across Africa demands more than incremental progress. It demands coordinated, strategic, and bold action from a movement that is prepared to grow in capacity, in credibility, and in ambition. The foundations are being laid. What needs to happen now is to build on them with the speed and intentionality that help the most animals on the continent.

Acknowledgment

We would like to thank Jose Ramon Mallen, Moritz Stumpe, and Tobias Leenaert for their review and helpful feedback on this post.

LLM use disclaimer: Claude helped with copywriting and copyediting of this post. It has been carefully edited and rewritten to faithfully reflect our views.