I was visiting with “Eric Gundersen”:http://www.developmentseed.org/team/eric-gundersen and his team the other day at the Development Seed offices and found he and “Robert Soden”:http://www.developmentseed.org/team/robert-soden excited to share the latest on their work with Open Street Map (OSM). Since I met the gang at Development Seed a year ago, I have always appreciated their approach for creating innovative solutions to the tough challenges faced by humanitarian organizations, and their recent work with OSM is a perfect example. It’s no secret that many humanitarian organizations working in Africa lack extensive, quality, open geospatial data; and for a smaller organizations like ours and Development Seed, having access to this data can be quite costly.
To quote Robert at Development Seed (via “Bonnie Bogle”:http://www.developmentseed.org/team/bonnie-bogle):
“We build a lot of mapping and data visualization tools for international development and humanitarian relief agencies, and we found that much of the necessary GIS data for these projects was proprietary or released under a restrictive license. Data silos waste the time and money of both the end-user and the organization that creates them, and critical base-layers like roads, railroads, and administrative boundaries continue to be harder to get than they should be. We decided that in order for our tools to be really helpful, we needed to contribute to one of the main GIS datasets that our tools rely upon – Open Street Map. Given the organizations we work with and the overall need, it made sense to start this work in Africa.”
Thus Robert decided to setup a “GIS for Humanitarian Relief Team”:http://www.developmentseed.org/blog/2009/jan/16/spring-2009-gis-humanitarian-relief-team this spring to work on improving the “Open Street Map”:http://www.openstreetmap.org/ dataset in key African countries. All-in-all, the team created a very impressive 141,107.17 miles (67 MB) of road data for Congo DRC, Tanzania, Sudan, Kenya, Burundi, and Rwanda from FAO’s “Africover”:http://www.africover.org/ project and the UN’s “DEPHA”:http://www.depha.org/ to Open Street Map!
%{color:green}We are fortunate to welcome public health and emerging infectious disease expert, Sarah Cheeseman, as a guest writer and contributor to The Global Resource Initiative’s (TGRI) blog.%
%{color:green}Sarah has nearly six years’ experience working in global infectious disease research and surveillance, and she received a Master of Science in Public Health Microbiology and Emerging Infectious Diseases from George Washington University in 2008. Her final research project examined the epidemiology of seasonal influenza before and after the reintroduction of H1N1 influenza in the late 1970s. Prior to entering the public health arena, Sarah studied foreign language and literature at Yale University, graduating with a BA in Spanish literature. She is proficient in multiple Romance languages, as well as in Turkish. Sarah’s interests include health socioeconomics, emerging infectious diseases, and culture-specific factors in infectious disease emergence and control.%
%{color:green}Sarah will be writing occasional posts for TGRI about these topics and we are very pleased to have her. Please give Sarah a hearty TGRI welcome!%
Introduction: What Went Wrong
A 2009 paper published in Disasters journal discussed the impact of a drought-related livestock vaccination initiative in Ethiopia, ultimately concluding that the vaccination effort had no effect on livestock mortality. According to the authors, vaccination failed to produce results primarily due to the inadequacy of the objective: the paper notes that “the common objective… seemed to be to vaccinate as many livestock as possible with the resources available.” Because the campaign did not explicitly define vaccination targets or goals (e.g., to vaccinate 85% of livestock against anthrax in areas identified by pastoralists as high-risk), animals were immunized with little eye toward effectiveness. Some species were immunized with inappropriate vaccines, and the delivery protocols for certain vaccines were ignored (i.e., animals were immunized once with vaccines that are only effective after multiple doses[1]).
This prompted me to consider the way all types of health initiatives are planned and evaluated, which of course turns out to be a huge can of worms. This post will attempt to answer some of the fundamental questions:
Are organizations engaged in philanthropic efforts expected to demonstrate that their work is effective? If so, how?
Is there a set of “best practices” that govern evaluating effectiveness, particularly with respect to animal health?
Interest in demonstrating results is growing, supported by changes in philanthropy as well as changes in health evaluation. How, then, can we get the most bang for our philanthropy buck?
The team at The Global Resource Initiative (TGRI) would like to announce that we have changed our domain name from http://in.itiative.org to http://www.globalresourceinitiative.org.
Dr. Kimothy Smith, the Director of The Global Resource Initiative (TGRI), will be in Nairobi, Kenya from March 9-12, 2009 for a series of meetings with African and international leaders in agriculture health, science, and economic development. Dr. Smith will be attending the fourth Steering Committee meeting of the Global Framework for Transboundary Animal Diseases (GF-TADs) at the African Union/InterAfrican Bureau for Animal Resources (AU-IBAR). Additionally, Dr. Smith will attend the ALive Executive Committee 13 and ALive General Assembly 4 meetings, as well as the fourth Steering Committee meeting of the Support Program to Integrated National Action Plans for Avian and Human Influenza (SPINAP-AHI).
It was a hot Thursday afternoon when we started out on a tour of the reputed largest livestock market on the African continent: Pugu Livestock Market. Pugu Livestock Market is located just outside and to the West of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
Getting There
Livestock arriving at Pugu Livestock Market come by rail, trail, truck, or some combination of these methods of transportation. They may be coming from anywhere in Tanzania and may have started out being herded along trails used for centuries. Along the way they may be loaded onto trucks and hauled over unpaved and paved roads. Some will be loaded onto livestock cars and ride the steel rails to the Pugu Rail Station before being unloaded onto the market grounds. Today, the majority of livestock are transported via truck. All animals require a transport permit issued by the Tanzania Ministry of Trade and Marketing along with proper health documentation by a District Veterinary Officer (DVO) from the Tanzania Ministry of Livestock Development.
After a quick flight from Dar es Salaam to Nairobi aboard the Tanzanian-based Precision Airways, Kimothy and I spent the morning meeting with Su Kahumbu Stephanou of Green Dreams Ltd (be sure check out her blog). Su’s office is just outside bustling downtown Nairobi and when we arrived, we were happy to find that she was joined by her colleague and business partner, Neil Cranston, the owner of the UK-based Global Foods Network. If you get the chance to meet either Su or Neil, rest assured that they will provide very interesting and energetic conversation around the history of organic farming in Africa along with its challenges and huge potential.
Su of Green Dreams, Ben from TGRI, and Neil of Global Foods Network meeting in Nairobi
We were introduced to Su by her sister, Paula Kahumbu, the CEO of Wildlife Direct, and were interested get to get to know an innovative local producer (Su works with numerous farmers throughout Kenya). Getting down to business, we chatted about the pros and cons of a SMS-based agriculture health network.
After visiting Tanzania Pride Meat, Ben Truscello, Dr. Anthony Knight and I made our way to Sokoine University of Agriculture, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine which is at the base of the beautiful Uluguru Mountains in nearby Morogoro.
Faculty of Veterinary Medicine at Sokoine University of Agriculture
Here we had a late afternoon meeting with Deputy Dean and Senior Lecturer Dr. Raphael Tihelwa Chibunda and Dr. S. I. Kimera to discuss animal disease surveillance in Tanzania. We made this connection thanks to an introduction by Dr. Joanne Stevens, an Associate at Google.org and, Professor Mark M. Rweyemamu, the Executive Director of the Southern African Centre for Infectious Disease Surveillance (SACIDS), Professor of Transboundary and Emerging Infectious Diseases at Sokoine University, and a Visiting Professor at Royal Veterinary College, University of London (to name but a few of Mark’s many prestigious titles). Dr. Kimera’s task beginning in January of this year has been to establish and set up the Secretariat of SACIDS at Sokoine University. The SACIDS mission, vision and philosophy resonated so much with what TGRI is about that I’ve posted them here:
Vision:
A Southern African society protected from devastating infectious diseases affecting the health of humans, animals, i.e. both terrestrial and aquatic, and plants, i.e. crop, forest and ornamental, thereby promoting livelihoods, socio-economic development including market access and the environment.
Mission:
To harness innovation in science and technology in order to improve Southern Africa’s capacity (including human, financial and physical) to detect, identify and monitor infectious diseases of humans, animals, plants and their interactions in order to better manage the risk posed by them.
Philosophy:
Working towards One Africa, One Health
Today we got up early and drove for about four hours from Dar es Salaam to Morogoro, Tanzania. Like many cities, Dar and Morogoro are connected by a single route; the Morogoro Road is a two-lane highway spotted with several villages and is traveled by all types of vehicles, from huge Scania lorries carrying petrol, to the “dala dala” (the ubiquitous Tanzanian mass transit mini-bus), to bicycles loaded with everything under the sun. We headed to Morogoro for a couple of reasons, but our first stop was to visit one of the largest integrated livestock ranches in Tanzania, Glenshiels Ranch, home of Tanzania Pride Meat.
You will see all kinds of transport along the Morogoro Road between Dar es Salaam and Morogoro, Tanzania. The brown mini-bus is the Tanzanian “dala dala”.
As a technologist, I had my eyes open for any interesting or innovative technology both along the way and at the ranch and while I did not find any hidden technology gems, I did chat with one of the ranch owners, Terry, about his satellite linked sausage producer (not kidding you). The ranch is linked to the internet via the satellite service iWay Africa.
There is nothing like experiencing narrow bandwidth first hand to help one appreciate the value of communicating information over a SMS platform! Due to bandwidth restrictions, we have not been able to share as much as quickly as we’d like but here is a sample of the progress we are making during our needs assessment trip to Tanzania.
The first stop on our needs assessment was to the Tanzanian offices of the target="_blank">USAID, where Ben Truscello, Dr. Anthony Knight and I met with Senior Agricultural Economist Dr. David Nyange. David was kind enough to meet with us and discuss the agriculture industry in Tanzania. In these discussions we covered the livestock value chain, movement of livestock within Tanzania and cross-border movements, and the policy and societal implications of the development of Tanzania’s agriculture industry.
The Global Resource Initiative would like to credit the following images used on our homepage:
