I found that national vets made use of official systems to create relationships. This is the case of the reporting of zoonosis outbreaks to the OIE, as illustrated by the ties between the grey node (OIE) and several yellow nodes (representing national vets) on Figure 14.141 But the main way of establishing
relationships with other professionals at the national level was through organised events142 that
aimed to coordinate zoonosis-related policy and management. These events took place in large urban settings, like the cities of Accra or Kumasi, in places such as ministry meeting rooms, universities, or hotels. Such events engaging vets alongside other professionals were of two kinds. Either they addressed a pressing issue of common interest for different parties (such as inter-ministerial committee meetings, policy consultation meetings), or they purposely aimed at building long-term partnerships in preparation for future issues that may arise and often had a OH label, such as training courses or workshops. These two main types of events created inter-sectoral bonds in different ways. One example of a pressing issue leading to inter-sectoral bonds was the organisation of national campaigns of prevention and preparedness to zoonotic diseases threats through the creation of inter- ministerial committees. This happened in 2007 in regard to avian influenza, and also at the time of my fieldwork (2014/15) in reaction to the Ebola epidemic that was occurring in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. Along with national-level human public health professionals, vets from the VSD HQ in Accra worked to prevent Ebola from affecting Ghana and to prepare an efficient response in case it did (see Chapter Three). In both inter-ministerial committees, vets could voice their interests and influence decisions around budgets and preventive interventions, and offer their knowledge to help
140I only focus on the national level, and below on the local level, and do not expand here on how vets establish
relationships with other actors at the regional level. This is because there was not any actor relevant to OH at the regional level (on the graph in Figure 15, we can see only one node which corresponds to the regional vet office). Although regional vets in my sample interacted a lot with both national and local actors, they mostly were experienced vet surgeonslocated in urban centres, and therefore interacted with these actors in the same way it is described in this section on interactions at the national level.
141 The veterinary services of OIE member countries are mandated to report animal diseases outbreaks that
feature on the OIE list of 117 notifiable diseases through the WAHIS interface.
142 Events that do not occur spontaneously but are planned in advance and involve an official organisation of
144
streamline the government’s communication message to the public in order to avoid confusion and panic.#99
Another example was the ‘National Consultative Multi-Disciplinary Stakeholders’ Workshop’ which I attended in Accra in August 2014. This meeting, already introduced in Chapter Three, aimed at collecting various viewpoints about the draft of a new livestock policy initiated by the VSD. Different parties sat around the same table with a spirit of discussing various perspectives of animal health policy and making the new policy inclusive of these perspectives. Various stakeholders attended, including representatives from the FAO, the United States Department of Agriculture, MoFA and the Animal Production Department, the VSD, associations of farmers, traders, and butchers, the Veterinary Technicians Association, and local government, as well as a legal consultant from the Attorney General’s Office.
During the National Consultative Multi-Disciplinary Stakeholders’ Workshop, there were lively interventions about anticipated difficulties in implementation of the newly proposed livestock policy (introduced in Chapter Three). For example, some participants said: ‘I can see that there will be
implementation issues’; ‘Paraprofessionals should be represented by a person on the Board of Directors’; ‘Will these regulations be done across divisions or will each division manage [their own]’?
Numerous potential conflicts of interests between different stakeholders at the table, not yet addressed by the current draft of the proposed policy, emerged from the discussion including livestock and meat transportation, water access for slaughterhouses, the poor state of the meat market, meat inspection by environmental officers, enforcement of policies by the police, medical examinations for butchers, competition between grazing areas and crops (tomato), free livestock vaccination, and shortage of veterinary staff. Each event thus served as an opportunity for coordination.
Examples of events aimed at establishing longer-term inter-sectoral partnerships included training programs and university courses or workshops, and generally targeted active professionals. For instance, in 2014, the Masters FELTP (see earlier) had been offered for the 7th year in a row by the
school of Public Health at the University of Ghana (actor present on the network in Figure 14). This course, funded by the CDC (also present as an actor in Figure 14) gathered together different health practitioners like vets, medical doctors and laboratory biologists, and this justified its label as a OH initiative.
Training workshops of a few days duration also happened in Accra and presented opportunities to build inter-sectoral relationships and to articulate a veterinary perspective. One senior vet from the VSD described the NADMO disaster management workshop she attended in January 2014 as a great opportunity for her to better understand approaches to dealing with disasters, but also to sensitise decision-makers at NADMO to emerging animal diseases as potential causes for disasters affecting human lives.#85
I attended a few sessions of a workshop called the OH Next-Gen Project which took place in Accra in January-February 2015 (introduced earlier). This workshop was funded by the European Commission and involved the training of ‘One Health Practitioners’ in the Anglophone countries of the Maghreb and Sahel by international experts, so that these trained practitioners could, in turn, train their younger and less experienced colleagues in their respective countries. The focus of the lectures and exercises was on prevention and control of the principal neglected zoonoses of the Sahel and Maghreb regions, to which human public health professionals were invited and which was supported by a web-based distance learning tool.
Therefore, interactions between my participants and national or international actors, as seen above, take place mainly through formal meetings or programmes gathering people from different professions and sectors around a specific issue or to build OH connections for addressing future needs. Other than these formal, organised events, there were few opportunities to interact and build relationships.