Day: October 26, 2022

Rome – The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) are scaling up efforts to strengthen global animal food security with the aim of protecting human lives and livelihoods while improving agrifood systems and safeguarding the environment.
USAID has reaffirmed once again its strong commitment to a longstanding and impactful partnership with FAO by granting $250 million to fund the FAO Global Health Security Programme (GHSP) for another five-year period (2022-2027).
The new funding will assist to implement the Quadripartite One Health Joint Plan of Action (OH-JPA), by enabling countries to sustain, with FAO support, the critical animal health and One Health capabilities developed in over 30 countries in Africa, South Asia and the Pacific, North Africa and the Near East. It will also help to strengthen capacities in selected new countries, thus helping national and regional stakeholders better prevent, detect and respond to health threats at the human, animal and environment interfaces.
“We are very grateful to USAID for its generous and timely contribution and for its ongoing support and long commitment,” said FAO Director-General QU Dongyu. “Human movement, the climate crisis, complex value chains, and the trade of livestock, wildlife and their products all contribute to the increased spread of diseases. We need to scale up our operations and collaborative efforts to curb this spread, and the new funding will enable FAO to strengthen the local animal health capacity, provide technical assistance on risk analysis and disease surveillance, strengthen outbreak control, preparedness and response, through a ‘One Health’ approach”. The ultimate outcome is the increased contribution of animal health systems to local and global health security and effective prevention of new pandemics.
The renewed partnership will build on the work that FAO has executed via its Emergency Centre for Transboundary Animal Diseases (ECTAD) in Asia and Africa since 2005. ECTAD has been active in more than 30 countries and is expanding geographically within the new contribution based on strategic and epidemiologic rationale. The support to countries will also assist them to leverage other investments in health security and agrifood systems transformation, including grants and loans from international financial institutions.
Bringing zoonotic diseases under control
The vast majority of emerging and endemic infectious zoonotic diseases are transboundary in nature. The FAO GHS programme envisages incorporating regional and epizonal perspectives which will allow for coherent approaches in disease prevention and control, as well as the more efficient use of limited resources in resource-constrained environments and leveraging corporate and Members’ resources.
The activities will focus on critical control points along the supply chain and on promoting biosecurity, hygiene precautions and good and sustainable production practices at animal-animal and animal-human interfaces to reduce health threats of animal origin, safeguard public health, livelihoods and agrifood systems.
To enable a stronger approach for disease control, bilateral and multilateral technical exchanges and cross-border collaboration between target countries should be further supported and expanded with focus on risk assessments, risk-based surveillance, diagnostic and pathogen characterization on biosecurity and biosafety as well as on prevention and risk reduction including vaccination and infection prevention and rational use of anitimicrobials.
Partnership between USAID and FAO in animal health
Over the last 16 years, the Government of the United States of America, through USAID, has provided $470 million to the FAO ECTAD to support the prevention, detection and response to animal and public health emergencies.
Through this partnership, FAO has been able to manage and coordinate the largest animal health capacity development programme in the world, establish multidisciplinary and highly skilled teams of experts to support the most vulnerable and less resourceful Members to improve their capacities to support disease control programmes and contribute to eliminating poverty, enhancing food safety and security, and protecting global health.

Source: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Countries in the ESA region are ageing rapidly, and 95 million people aged 60+ will reside in the ESA region by 2050. The impact of this trend and the needs of growing populations of older people are still not sufficiently considered in national and internationally driven development initiatives, putting older people at risk of being left behind.
This report provides an overview of population ageing and health trends in 23 countries in East and Southern Africa, and assesses the readiness and responsiveness of health, social welfare and long-term care systems to ageing and the needs of older people in the region. It assesses the state of regional, sub-regional and national frameworks and structures in place to support healthy ageing in six focal countries (Ethiopia, Kenya, Lesotho, Mauritius, Rwanda, and South Africa) and provides a set of recommendations to inform policy development and strategic interventions going forward.

Source: United Nations Population Fund

This document presents an analysis of interviews conducted with all individuals assisted in their voluntary return destination by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) between 2017 and June 2022 (148,681) to in one of the 23 countries covered by the West and Central Africa region (WCA). The analysis combines datasets from both Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration (AVRR) and Voluntary Humanitarian returns (VHR).
Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration (AVRR) : Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration is an indispensable part of a comprehensive approach to migration management.
AVRR programmes provide administrative, logistical and financial support, including reintegration assistance, to migrants unable or unwilling to remain in host/transit countries and who decide to return to their country of origin.
The successful implementation of AVRR programmes requires the cooperation and participation of a broad range of actors, including the migrants, civil society and the governments in both host and transit countries and countries of origin. The partnerships created by IOM and a diverse range of national and international stakeholders are essential to the effective implementation of AVRR – from the return preparation to the reintegration stage.
For migrants who need to return home but lack the means to do so, IOM’s AVRR programmes are often the only solution to their immediate difficulties and needs. Beneficiaries of IOM’s assistance include:
1. individuals whose application for asylum was rejected or withdrawn
2. stranded migrants
3. victims of trafficking, and
4. other vulnerable migrants, including unaccompanied migrant children, or those with health-related needs.
Voluntary Humanitarian returns (VHR) :. In February 2011, civil unrest in Libya rapidly evolved into an armed conflict which led to the crossing of Libyan borders by some 796,000 migrants in 2011. In the aftermath of the conflict, the socio-economic conflict which remained unstable was further fragilized by the Covid 19 pandemic. In fact, the loss of livelihood, the lack of financial resources and inadequate housing made the living conditions very difficult. Despite those difficulties, Libya remained among the top two host countries for migrants who were nationals of the WCA region from 2017 to June 2022. IOM’s Voluntary Humanitarians return program was thus necessary to assist the vulnerable migrants, and ensure them a safe and secure return.
Since the onset of the crisis, IOM’s strategy is to support Member States in protecting their nationals by providing evacuation assistance to stranded migrants in Libya through its “Voluntary Humanitarian Returns” programme. IOM deemed necessary to adopt a new terminology from AVR to VHR to stress the humanitarian nature of this operation.
The objective of this document is to provide an overview of the profile of those assisted by IOM to return to their country of origin through AVRR and VHR programmes between from January 2017 to June 2022.
Information about the questionnaire and the applied methodology and limitations can be found at the end of the report.

Source: International Organization for Migration

WFP spends more than US$745 million annually in East Africa. This spending is vital to the humanitarian operations, and also affects local economies, potentially creating large income and production impacts.
The World Food Programme (WFP) spends more than US$745 million annually in Regional Bureau of Nairobi (RBN) countries. In 2019, the RBN region moved 1.1 million MT of food throughout East Africa. It disbursed US$270 million in cash to 5.4 million beneficiaries in the countries covered by RBN. It procured and supplied more than 500,000 MT of food from local, regional, and global sources. This spending is vital to the humanitarian operations of the WFP. It also affects RBN economies, potentially creating large income and production impacts in the region.
This project uses state-of-the-art economic modelling tools to estimate the broader economic impacts of WFP’s expenditures in RBN countries and in the East Africa region as a whole. To achieve its food security and nutrition objectives, WFP operations spend large sums of money on food, logistics and other non-food goods and services in East Africa countries. This can stimulate production and incomes in the directly affected countries and activities. As the impacts of WFP operations work their way through the economy, they spread across households, businesses, and localities within countries as well as to other countries in the region, through trade. Because of this, the amount WFP spends represents only part of the impact of WFP spending in the region; there are also income, production, and trade spillovers, or secondary impacts.

Source: World Food Programme