Ethiopia, first African country to benefit from internal OIE PVS training for its veterinary workforce

Role play: critically and thoroughly interviewing VS staff on PVS “critical competencies”. Picture © P. Bastiaensen (oie) 2018.

More than 40 Ethiopian veterinary professionals took part in the first national OIE PVS Pathway orientation training workshop, in Addis Ababa, last week. The Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia is governed –as its name indicates- under a federal system with nine Regional States (and two Chartered Cities), each enjoying considerable autonomy. Given this, Ethiopia had requested PVS training from the OIE to better enable it to undertake PVS self-evaluation, including at the decentralised level, to supplement its OIE PVS Evaluation reports at national level.

Earlier such OIE PVS training courses had been conducted for the European Union, China, Australia, Canada, India and – lately – Mexico. This meant the training methods have been developed and refined over time for this workshop, which represented the first time PVS training had been delivered on the African continent.

The Government of Ethiopia requested PVS training support from the OIE to establish capacity for PVS self-evaluation shortly after the 2011 PVS Evaluation and the 2012 PVS Gap Analysis. This long-awaited workshop therefore was held at the Getfam Hotel and brought together some 43 veterinarians from the national veterinary authority, under the (federal) Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries, decentralised veterinary services at Regional State level, as well as the Addis Ababa metropolitan area, various universities, laboratories (NAHDIC and VDFACA ) and the Ethiopian Veterinary Association (EVA ).

Facilitated by the OIE’s Regional Activities Department and the Sub-Regional Representation for Eastern Africa, the team of trainers, consisting of Drs. John Stratton, John Weaver and Patrick Bastiaensen, facilitated a series of practical exercises with the aim of familiarising participants with the structure and logic of the PVS tool, leading towards a mock-evaluation in a hypothetical (African) country and closing with an all-Ethiopia working group session in which the broad outline of a self-evaluation programme was laid out.

Except for the costs related to the participation of the team of OIE trainers, the workshop was entirely funded from sources identified by the Government of Ethiopia.

The next seminar will target a selection of English – speaking African countries and will be held in Johannesburg, South Africa, from 26 – 28 June 2018, followed by a similar regional seminar for French – speaking African countries, to be held in Dakar, Senegal, from 10 – 12 July 2018