Strengthening Cross-Border Animal Health Surveillance & Risk-Based Monitoring of Priority Transboundary Animal Diseases (TADs)

The training

The Technical Working Group (TWG) training for IGAD Clusters I, II and III ran from 11 to 13 February 2026 in Naivasha, Kenya, convened with funding from GIZ under the Peaceful and Resilient Borderlands Programme (PRBP).

In attendance were ICPAC, ICPALD, GIZ and technical officers — epidemiology and diagnostics specialists — from Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and South Sudan, representing national and sub-national animal health authorities across the three clusters.

Why the borderlands are the risk

The IGAD borderland clusters — Karamoja (Cluster I), Moyale (Cluster II) and the Mandera Triangle (Cluster III) — are predominantly pastoral and agro-pastoral zones where livestock mobility across borders is central to livelihoods, trade, resilience and food security. Seasonal migration in search of pasture and water, coupled with formal and informal livestock trade, sustains millions of households.

Those same dynamics, combined with porous borders, climate variability, recurrent droughts, insecurity, conflict over natural resources, weak infrastructure and limited veterinary service coverage, create high-risk conditions for priority transboundary animal diseases to be introduced and to spread.

Memoranda of Understanding, implementation frameworks and an Animal Health Information Sharing Protocol already exist among the participating countries. Their operationalisation has remained limited — the gaps are in national resource allocation, technical capacity, epidemiological analysis, laboratory diagnostics, digital interoperability and risk-based surveillance.

What was covered

The training aimed to strengthen technical capacity and cross-border animal health early warning systems by equipping TWG members with practical skills across the surveillance chain.

• Epidemiological surveillance and risk-based monitoring

• Laboratory diagnostics, and the linkages back to epidemiology

• Interoperable digital surveillance systems

• Translating signed protocols into operational collaboration

Where Husika fits

National digital animal health surveillance systems already generate valuable disease intelligence: the Kenya Animal Bio-Surveillance System (KABS) in Kenya, and the Animal Disease Notification and Investigation System (ADNIS) and the Disease Outbreak and Vaccination Activity Reporting System (DOVAR) in Ethiopia.

At the regional level, Husika provides the multi-hazard early warning and communication platform. What had not been fully operationalised was the join between them — structured integration and interoperability between the national systems and Husika.

That join is the work: bringing KABS, ADNIS and DOVAR into Husika so that a signal detected in one country becomes a warning available across the cluster, rather than a record held in a national database.

What participants committed to

Participants reaffirmed a set of commitments that carry the work past the workshop.

• Operationalising MoUs and information sharing protocols

• Enhancing risk-based and syndromic surveillance

• Integrating KABS, ADNIS and DOVAR into Husika

• Strengthening laboratory–epidemiology linkages

• Sustaining TWG coordination mechanisms beyond project support

The next six to twelve months

The cluster action plans developed during the training will guide implementation over the next 6–12 months, with emphasis on early warning, outbreak prediction and coordinated cross-border response to priority TADs.

Prediction is the word that matters. Surveillance that only confirms an outbreak is a record-keeping exercise; surveillance wired into a regional early warning platform is what gives a neighbouring county time to act before the herd arrives.