Harnessing Dairy Goats for Food Security and Climate Resilience in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Interdisciplinary Review of Nutrition, Genomics, and Policy Pathways

Dairy goats offer significant potential to enhance food security, promote climate resilience, and improve rural livelihoods in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), particularly within women-led smallholder farming systems. This interdisciplinary narrative review integrates findings from nutritional science, climate adaptation studies, recent genomic innovations, and policy analyses (2010–2025) to critically evaluate dairy goats’ roles in addressing persistent malnutrition and vulnerability to climate extremes. Goat milk provides vital macronutrients and micronutrients and can contribute to improved dietary adequacy. Compared with larger ruminants such as cattle, goats—particularly indigenous and locally adapted populations—often exhibit greater tolerance to heat stress, flexible browsing behaviour, and lower water requirements. However, these adaptive advantages vary widely among dairy goat breeds, with high-yielding temperate breeds generally showing lower resilience to climatic extremes than indigenous SSA ecotypes. In addition, the per-kg GHG emissions for goat milk are typically higher than those for bovine milk, although system-level benefits may emerge in drylands where goats fit local heat/feed constraints and where species mix and management differ substantially. Recent genomic advancements, notably genome-wide association studies and selection signature analyses, have identified candidate loci for thermotolerance, disease resistance, and milk yield. Near-term improvement is most plausible where breeding is anchored in community-based programmes supported by minimal identification and phenotyping, with marker use most defensible when validated within target populations. Despite emerging opportunities through microfinance and climate finance, especially for women-centric cooperatives, dairy goats remain underrepresented in national livestock and climate policies, and life cycle assessment data to support formal carbon–credit integration are limited. We therefore recommend dedicated funding to goat-specific extension and animal health, targeted gender-inclusive training, strategic investments in genomic and data infrastructure, and enhanced data collection for carbon accounting. Overall, the evidence synthesised here indicates that scalable dairy goat development in SSA is unlikely without the coordinated implementation of climate-smart management and delivery systems (animal identification and core recording), alongside context-validated genomic approaches (e.g., MAS or genomic prediction integrated within community-based breeding where reference resources and phenotypes exist) and targeted policy and financing.