This Strategic Plan is a 5-year multilateral document aiming at identifying the opportunities to overcome the major challenges that affect the animal resources sector in the African continent ranging from the shortage of veterinary professionals to insufficient national budgets, the complexity of international trade, climate change, rapidly emerging and re-emerging diseases, and increasing food insecurity. This, in line with the AU-IBAR Mandate of supporting and coordinating the utilization of animals (livestock, fisheries and wildlife) as a resource for human wellbeing in the Member States and to contribute to economic development, as to achieve the Vision of an Africa in which animal resources contribute significantly to the reduction of poverty and hunger. The Plan identifies the following six programs to be implemented to achieve its goals (1) reducing the impact on livelihoods and public health of transboundary animal diseases and zoonoses; (2) enhancing the capacity to conserve and sustainably use animal resources and their natural resource base; (3) improving investment opportunities and competitiveness of animal resources; (4) promoting the development of, and compliance with, standards and regulations; (5) improving knowledge management in animal resources to facilitate informed and timely decision making; and (6) facilitating the development of policies and institutional capacities for improved utilization of animal resources. The main tool proposed to achieve a better production is to intervene in improvement of animal health by (i) categorizing diseases and disease control interventions, using internationally recognized scientific tools to embrace an integrated multiple-disease approach; (ii) establishing effective institutional mechanisms for the collection of animal health information; (iii) establishing a continental mechanism for disease early warning and emergency response for diseases with epidemic/pandemic potential; (iv) spearheading a coordinated approach to the training of veterinarians, including continuing education and minimum standards setting; (v) facilitating the engagement of private sector actors in TADs prevention and control through private-public partnership strategies. In the field of food, the Plan above all deals with the topic in terms of trade and standards improvement and proposes of (i) strengthening Africa’s ability to set and comply with essential production and trade standards relevant for animals and animal products (SPS, food safety and quality standards, and certification systems) that facilitate competitiveness of African animal producers to enter high value markets – within and beyond the continent; (ii) reducing the occurrence of TADs and zoonoses. To help smallholder producers, important measures to increase the productivity growth consist in increasing resilience against drought, also to enhance food security for pastoral communities. In general, the document believes that an improvement in animal health is to be considered a food security measure, in particular for the more vulnerable communities. To increase the environmental protection, main interventions are (i) reduction in loss of genetic diversity of livestock, wildlife and fish resources building on experiences and lessons learnt from plant genetic resources to facilitate faster progress in this regard on animal resources; (ii) improvement of the ability to cope with and mitigate the adverse effects of environmental variability (including climate change) and associated conflicts, especially on vulnerable groups; (iii) sustainable use of agricultural diversity and the natural resource base on which future agricultural production depends. Inclusiviness, coordinantion, and investments are the keywords for the future economic and social growth, to achieved by (i) improving a coordination mechanism for pooling resources of multiple Member States in the conservation of animal genetic resources; (ii) coordinating transboundary natural resources interventions and policies; (iii) collating and making available the best practices from public domain sources; (iv) developing communication, public relations and convening approaches to promote a proactive communication and convening of strategic stakeholder groups; (v) improving pastoral areas development/investments agendas and identifying development opportunities and how innovation can contribute to promotion of pastoral investments; (vi) facilitating research to support animal resource investments; (vii) enhancing smallholder market orientation and competitiveness by providing advocacy and capacity building; (viii) creating mechanisms and platforms for sharing market information (building on existing databases) and providing networks for traders and key service providers, creating organizational frameworks to support them; (ix) conducting a continent-wide analysis of market behavior and trends for animal resources and products, including data available from already completed studies, and make these available; (x) facilitating the formulation and harmonization of evidence based and coherent policies; (xi) strengthening the capacities of public and private institutions to effectively perform their core roles in order to transform the animal resources sector for greater impact on poverty alleviation. As for Governance, each of the six programs will be coordinated by Programme Managers appointed by the Director of AU-IBAR. Active projects will be managed within these programs, based on the principle of ‘center of gravity’ which provides the best synergy or the most relevance for the activities of the project in question. The Director, the programme managers, the head of finance, the head of administration, the M&E expert and other members appointed by the Director will form the AU-IBAR Management Team (IMT).
2009-12-16