On key programme deliverables including economic methodology, information platforms, country case studies, and defending future investment.

The Global Burden of Animal Disease Programme (GBADs), co-led by the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) and the University of Liverpool (UoL), is in the process of developing and testing a methodology and information platform to assess and illustrate the economic burden of animal diseases in standardised terms of production loss, expenditure, and trade impacts. In September, the programme held two strategic meetings with key stakeholders to discuss programmatic progress and get guidance on selected topics.

Executive Committee discussions

The GBADs Executive Committee, which was created at the launch of the programme in 2020 to perform project management control and to monitor business and strategic issues, held a three-day virtual meeting from 21 to 23 September. The first day focused on GBADs’ monitoring and evaluation framework and system, while the second day covered data governance and data flows, gave an overview of an ongoing Ethiopian case study, and highlighted the use of statistics to assess GBADs. The third and last day centered on a demonstration of a newly developed dashboard to visualise animal population and biomass data. These discussions provided an opportunity to look closely at the programme’s success criteria, data governance systems and processes, and how to best incorporate new data from various sources (e.g. OIE data) into the economic and analytical models.

Deliberations from the Internal Steering Committee

The second GBADs strategic meeting held on 30 September 2021 coincided with the programme’s third Internal Steering Committee (ISC) meeting. The ISC meets quarterly and is composed of senior leaders at the OIE and the UoL,  representatives from financial resource partners and key international organisations. It was created to give strategic guidance on how GBADs can achieve financial sustainability, probability of success and global acceptance of its methodology. On this occasion, the ISC provided feedback on the dashboard presented during the Executive Committee meeting, GBADs economic methodology, as well as the financing and selection criteria for future case studies. Chaired virtually by OIE Director General Dr Monique Éloit, this ISC meeting was attended by representatives from the European Commission, International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), World Bank, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), Gates Foundation, and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), in addition to the GBADs’ Directorate and Secretariat, and independent consultants.

The next Internal Steering Committee meeting is scheduled for 16 December 2021 and will provide an opportunity to reflect on the past year’s achievements, to discuss future resource mobilisation efforts, and to review the programme monitoring and evaluation framework.

 More information on GBADs: https://animalhealthmetrics.org/