Facilitators trained to disseminate the "Alert" card game.

After a first successful training, organised in October 2022 in Dakar, Senegal, which resulted in 18 ALERT ‘serious’ game facilitators trained, a second training session was organised in Yaoundé, Cameroon, in February 2024, in collaboration with the Cameroon zoonosis programme and CIRAD.

The ALERT game was developed by the EBO-SURSY project in collaboration with CIRAD and BIOVIVA. The board game aims to raise awareness among local communities and strengthen collaboration with the technical services in charge of the system, to reinforce the commitment of stakeholders to the system and thus its effectiveness, and to develop simple, sustainable tools and training in good surveillance practices that can be deployed on a large scale by national partners.

Training of facilitators for the ALERT card game (Cameroon).

A total of 23 facilitators (5 women and 18 men) from the veterinary faculties of the University of the Mountains, Buea and Ngaroundéré, the Garoua Wildlife School, the Gosen Health Center, the Faculty of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, the Research Center for Emerging and Re-emerging Diseases (CREMER), Veterinary and Wildlife services, the SWM project, WWF and Cameroon’s zoonoses programme were trained.

Over a period of four days, CIRAD and WOAH trainers explained the rules and mechanics of the game to participants, enabling them to play independently. Practical sessions were organised at the Catholic University of Central Africa with around a hundred final-year students from the public health sector, during which the facilitators practiced their game facilitation skills.

Having training facilitators is part of the game’s dissemination strategy. Each of the structures that took part in the training received a set of the game, and the facilitators are expected to contribute to its dissemination by organising game sessions in their respective departments within their professional framework.