Application of the Global Burden of Animal Diseases methods at country level: the experiences of Ethiopia case study

Animals play a central role in the livelihoods and welfare of humans. Animal diseases have a great impact on the benefit derived from animals and can also be a risk to human health. Better control of animal diseases generates wider societal benefits, including reducing the climate change and ecological impact of livestock, and improving animal welfare. To better understand the scale of investment justified for the control and prevention of animal disease, measures of the wide-ranging disease impacts on animal production and health are needed.

The Global Burden of Animal Diseases (GBADs) programme is quantifying animal disease burden, from the local to global levels. The GBADs programme includes country case studies for national and local level analysis. Ethiopia is one of the first case study countries in which GBADs has been applied. The Ethiopia case study consists of three activity areas: 1) stakeholder engagement, 2) livestock disease burden estimation, including data collection, analytics, evidence generation and communication and 3) capacity building in animal health economics. The stakeholder engagement involved different stakeholder communication platforms. It was important to familiarise stakeholders with GBADs and engage their support in various ways, including data access, and through this engagement increase the relevance and utility of the programme tools and outputs to their needs.

Existing data were retrieved from multiple sources and used to estimate disease burden. This involved multiple steps including estimation of biomass and economic value, the animal health loss envelope (farm level disease burden), wider economic impacts, and attribution of the disease burden to different levels of causes. This was carried out for major livestock species (cattle, sheep, goats, and poultry) in Ethiopia. Capacity building on animal health economics was done for GBADs end users to increase competence in utilising animal health economic evidence, including GBADs outputs. This paper documents experiences in the implementation of these activities in the GBADs Ethiopia case study.