Why Animal Welfare League is campaigning for animals across Africa
As a veterinary student in Ghana, Jacob Ayang cared deeply about animal welfare, but there were so few animal organisations around him that a career in advocacy wasn’t even on his radar. He became the Senior Corporate Campaigns Lead and Global Partnerships Manager at Animal Welfare League, the Ghanaian organization he co-founded, and helped to bring cage-free campaigns to countries across Africa, landing 15+ cage-free commitments.
A vet with a passion for welfare
Jacob trained as a veterinary surgeon in Ghana. At vet school, his passion for animal welfare showed itself through direct care. As faculty president, he mobilised fellow students to carry out rabies vaccinations and run community awareness sessions telling people why it matters to treat animals kindly and that animals feel a full range of emotions.
In his final year, Jacob started thinking seriously about what to do after graduating. Around the same time, his friend and classmate Daniel attended an animal welfare conference and came back with the idea of starting a nonprofit. Jacob was excited to join him, and together they founded Animal Welfare League.
Rethinking where to help
While working out his next steps, Jacob wanted to build his expertise and understand how he could play an active role for animals. Taking AAC’s course turned out to be a pivotal moment.
“There’s just so much to know,” he says. “Many people expect recruitment content like this to be shallow, but I was surprised by how in-depth it went”.
When Animal Welfare League started, the team was focused on direct care for companion animals. AAC showed them that if they wanted to be as impactful as possible, they should look at farmed animals instead.
The number of farmed animals is overwhelming compared with companion animals, and the level of neglect is enormous. Jacob found the argument sound, and it helped the team reposition their strategy and take a completely new direction.
Working to free hens from cages
Animal Welfare League has worked on cage-free campaigns since 2021. Its main goal is to free around 25 million hens from cages. The organisation also runs projects on donkey welfare, fish welfare and policy.
As Corporate Campaigns Lead, Jacob engages with companies to persuade them to commit to going cage-free and source eggs only from cage-free farms. He also carries out research into how consumers in Ghana see the issue and what producers think about moving to cage-free production.
The team works with producers too, encouraging cage-free farmers to stay cage-free and supporting farmers who use battery cages to make the switch. As Global Partnerships Manager, Jacob builds partnerships at home and abroad with others who share the mission of helping as many hens as possible.
The work is now expanding beyond Ghana. Animal Welfare League recently ran a workshop in South Africa, where it has also held corporate meetings and has a cage-free directory. A workshop in Morocco is coming up, and the team is looking at Egypt, where the fishing industry is huge. The idea is to focus on countries with large numbers of animals whose welfare badly needs improving, an approach Jacob links directly back to AAC’s advice.
Why corporate campaigns look different in Africa
In many Western countries, companies feel pressure to listen to consumers, who can protest if a company treats animals badly. In Ghana, that pressure largely doesn’t exist. Public awareness of animal welfare is low, so companies don’t expect customers to demand higher-welfare products.
That means Animal Welfare League has to offer companies a positive reason to change. One common question from businesses is where they’d even find cage-free eggs, since Ghana has no formal labelling system. So the team connects companies directly with cage-free producers they already know.
It adds a lot of extra work, and it isn’t always easy. Sometimes a company wants to source cage-free eggs, but the nearest cage-free farm is far away, and transport costs push the price too high. Jacob hopes to eventually reach a point where companies can find cage-free producers without the team’s help. For now, though, stepping in to support the transition is part of the job.
As a member of the Open Wing Alliance, Animal Welfare League has access to resources that have been extremely helpful. But Jacob stresses that Western tactics can’t simply be copied. They need to be adapted to local contexts.
The challenges of working in a neglected space
Jacob sees a lack of talent as one of the biggest challenges for animal advocacy in Africa. Few people are working in the field, and the work can feel isolating. Sometimes even family and friends don’t understand why he and his colleagues do what they do.
That’s why the team makes a point of finding community. Staff are encouraged to attend conferences, join online programmes and connect with advocates around the world. Jacob values the way AAC introduced him to people working on the same issues, some of them surprisingly close to home.
Funding is another challenge. Africa receives comparatively little funding for animal advocacy, yet because costs are lower, a small amount of money can go a long way.
A day in Jacob’s role
Jacob enjoys how varied his work is. No two weeks look the same, and there are always new challenges to tackle.
Much of his corporate campaigns work involves emailing and visiting companies. The team has been developing an accountability tool that ranks companies in Ghana based on their public animal welfare policies. Building it takes a lot of research, including going through companies’ sustainability reports.
In a typical week, Jacob might finalise a strategy for approaching companies, update a web page and prepare leaflets and presentations showing management the difference between sourcing from cage-free farms and battery cage farms. Then he’ll spend a full day out of the office, visiting one company after another to show them how they’re ranked and encourage them to improve before the rankings go public to local and international consumers.
Jacob’s advice
Jacob’s first recommendation is to talk to an AAC career advisor. It gave him perspectives he’d never considered, and put a strong emphasis on personal fit, helping you work out where you can make the biggest difference.
For anyone interested in working in Africa, his message is clear: the movement needs people. It needs many more hands and many more creative thinkers. Policy work, for example, has barely been tested in Africa, and people with legal backgrounds or other relevant skills could make a big difference.
He also encourages people to reach out directly. Many African organisations don’t advertise roles or volunteer opportunities because of limited funding, but that doesn’t mean they don’t need help. Animal Welfare League has welcomed interns and volunteers from Kenya and other countries.
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Written by Holly Errington
