Diagnostic testing is the bedrock of effective animal health interventions. Diagnostic tests are run on samples collected from animals and detect either the disease-causing agent, such as a virus or bacteria, or the body’s immune response to that specific agent. They turn a farmer’s or vet’s disease suspicion into a definite disease diagnosis, allowing proper treatment. At a population level, test results can be systematically collated to build a picture of the burden and distribution of different diseases. This surveillance information enables governments to target disease control measures, including vaccination, where they have the biggest impact for averting livestock losses, improving productivity and promoting trade. Tests can also be used to assess immunity levels in vaccinated animals, telling us whether vaccination ultimately resulted in the intended outcome – protection from disease. Surveillance also allows early outbreak detection and rapid response needed to limit disease spread.
Many benefits; so why are diagnostic tests still underused, and why does surveillance remain patchy for Kenya’s livestock?
With GALVmed’s 5-year VITAL 2 programme underway to increase ruminant vaccination rates, these questions are timely.
To address them, GALVmed, TAHSSL partners and Kenya’s Directorate of Veterinary Services (DVS) co-organised a stakeholder workshop in Nairobi. Over 2 days, almost 100 participants brainstormed. From government and private vets from as far as Wajir and Laikipia counties, to farmers, NGOs, researchers and diagnostics manufacturers – perspectives were shared and expertise pooled. Energy levels were high, helped by the beat of a Maasai warrior drum to keep time, as was the sense of urgency that better diagnostic systems are needed. Long distances to labs, long turnaround times for test results and low levels of feedback to farmers and into surveillance systems were among key challenges identified.
Dr Johnson Ouma and Camilla Benfield during the workshop on Diagnostics for Effective Ruminant Disease Control in Kenya
Diagnostic tests cost money, but is lack of testing a false economy? The Kiambaa Dairy Farmers Co-operative Society said routine diagnostics could reduce antibiotic spending by 30%. Farmers are willing to pay for diagnostics if the value proposition is clear. Proper diagnostic testing reduces antibiotic misuse and reduces the grave societal challenge of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Diagnostics benefit not only farmers, but many value chain actors, such as aggregators, off-takers and processors. Can sustainable business models leverage this shared benefit to share the costs?
One clear priority is demonstrating the value of diagnostics to farmers, value chain actors and Kenya’s wider One Health agenda. That means building confidence that diagnostic results improve timely decision-making, and strengthening surveillance to better support disease prevention and control – else Kenya cannot realise the potential of its livestock sector.
To action this, the workshop served as a springboard for co-designing a Roadmap – a plan for strengthening Kenya’s diagnostic and surveillance system. The Roadmap will be developed over the coming months with DVS, TAHSSL and other partners, with the aim of a validated plan by the end of the year.
The Roadmap sets the direction. What will determine whether Kenya builds the diagnostic system its livestock sector needs is the partnerships that carry it forward. Those between government, veterinarians, farmers, manufacturers and value chain actors. At stake are farmer livelihoods, food safety, and Kenya’s role in the global response to antimicrobial resistance.
Read more about the workshop’s findings and recommendations here.
And don’t miss the interviews recorded during the event, available here.
Blog written by Camilla Benfield, Product Development Lead, Research & Development, GALVmed.
If you have spent any time around animal health or veterinary product regulation in Africa, you have probably heard some version of the same complaint. Every country does things a little differently. Approval requirements vary from one border to the next. Regulatory capacity is uneven — some agencies are well-resourced; others are stretched painfully thin. And the result of all that fragmentation is not just paperwork headaches. It is real delays getting good products to farmers who need them, and it is an open door for substandard products and antimicrobial resistance to creep in.
What PARAN-VPs actually is (and is not)
When I recently joined regulators from across the continent for the validation of the Pan African Regulatory Authorities Network for Veterinary Products (PARAN-VP), I left the workshop more optimistic than I expected. As I looked around the room, there was a shared sense of purpose across a group that does not always agree easily, regulators from countries with very different systems, capacities and priorities finding a common frame.
But first, let us clarify what PARAN-VP is not trying to be. It is not a central regulator overriding national authority. Countries still make their own market authorisation decisions and every Member State’s sovereignty over its own regulatory choices stays intact. It is a voluntary platform. PARAN-VP offers coordination: shared guidelines, information sharing, regulatory reliance, and capacity building.
PARAN-VP is explicitly designed to build on what already exists rather than compete with it. It is meant to work alongside frameworks like the African Medicines Agency and existing regional and national systems, strengthening the connections between them instead of adding yet another disconnected layer.
How we got here
The Nairobi validation workshop was not the beginning of this story — it was more like a milestone in a journey that has been building for a few years now.
The journey traces back to the 2023 meeting of regulators and industry in Abuja, where the need for a coordinated regulatory platform was discussed. From there, the idea moved into the African Union system through the Specialized Technical Committee on Agriculture, Rural Development, Water and Environment later that year, and by 2024 the Executive Council had formally endorsed it at the AU Summit.
Then came more groundwork. Technical discussions in Dar es Salaam, followed by a broader conference of regulators and stakeholders in November 2025 helped sharpen the concept and build wider buy-in. By the time we all gathered in Nairobi this June, PARAN-VP was not a proposal anymore. It was already a shared continental vision. The workshop’s job was to confirm it and, more importantly, start figuring out how to actually make it run.
What’s next
The structure we have landed on is deliberately lean: a Network Assembly, a Steering Committee, a Secretariat, and Technical Working Groups tackling specific areas like regulatory guidelines, pharmacovigilance, and antimicrobial resistance.
The next steps are the unglamorous but essential kind — setting up governance structures, getting the Secretariat operational, launching those Technical Working Groups. Early priorities will include assessing the current state of regulatory capacity across countries, developing harmonised guidelines, and piloting approaches to regulatory reliance and information sharing. The Secretariat will be housed at AU-IBAR in Nairobi. How the network sustains itself financially beyond initial partner support is the open question the coming months will need to answer.
Livestock face a myriad of deadly diseases. Many feel there is need to accelerate the development and distribution of vaccines for chickens, cows, sheep and goats. But small homestead farmers in rural areas can struggle to access these life-saving medicines and vaccines. That’s why GALVmed aims to bring vaccines straight to their door.
“The happiness of a Maasai is cattle,” says Nailogu Naikuni, smiling as she pats one of her cows on the back, roughing its hair. She’s walking through the pasture, clad in her teal and red traditional shuka, her neck, ears and crown draped in twinkling beads. “I’ve named them, so when I go milk a cow, I say, ‘come Noonkeye,’ and ‘I love you so much’.”
Naikuni is a Maasai farmer in Eng’amata Esinoni, a remote area of Kajiado County, in Kenya. She and her husband own a small homestead, where they’ve raised their 10 children – five boys and five girls – and generations of cows and goats.
Their livelihood as a family, she explains, depends on the well-being of their livestock and cattle, which they rear for milk, slaughter for meat, and sell on the market to pay for other necessities, including their children’s schooling fees. “The cows are our bank,” says Naikuni. “I have no other savings, the savings are the cattle.”
Naikuni trains her children on how to take care of the cattle when they’re off from school. “I tell them, ‘this is your world for your survival’,” she says.
But herds in rural homesteads throughout Africa, like Naikuni’s, can often be almost entirely wiped out by livestock diseases and fast-spreading diseases. Diseases like contagious bovine pleuropneumonia (CBPP), foot-and-mouth disease, lumpy skin disease and pestes des petits ruminants decimate herds over short periods of time. And while medication – and even preventative vaccines – for such diseases are constantly being developed, fine-tuned and deployed worldwide, such solutions are often too far removed from realities like Naikuni’s. They can be too inaccessible, and simply not made to cater to the needs of small-scale farmers who don’t run massive, industrialised farming operations, she says.
GALVmed’s work over the past decades has focused on changing that, attempting to bridge the gap between vaccine producers and the people who most need access to their products.
“There’s a lot of challenges for us Maasai at the moment, and many different diseases that make it hard for livestock keeping,” says Naikuni, who describes seeing her cattle and livestock die from sudden symptoms like diarrhoea, bloating and coughing, even overnight.
Worldwide, more than 20% of livestock production is lost to disease every year, costing producers a yearly $300bn (£220bn). Despite having been eradicated in the developed world, for instance, CBPP and contagious caprine pleuropneumonia are two of the most rampant ruminant diseases in Africa, killing thousands of cows and goats a year with a high fever and aggressive respiratory symptoms. Naikuni and her neighbours refer to it as ‘Olodua’, which can also decrease the milk productivity of livestock.
Foot-and-mouth disease is a similarly highly contagious viral disease that causes blisters and excessive salivation in hoofed animals. The disease significantly reduces milk production, and affects their ability to calve, which can have dramatic economic consequences. Lumpy skin disease kills cattle via pox-like symptoms, while the famed peste des petits ruminants (PPR), also known as the small ruminant plague, which impacts more than 300 million farming households each year and can infect up to 90% of a herd of goats if they’ve never been exposed to the disease before, and kill 70% of them.
“If my cow gets sick, I will be sorely disturbed, and I won’t leave it alone,” says Naikuni. Over the years, it’s gotten easier. Since the arrival of a new veterinarian in town and the development of some new vaccines and medications, farmers like Naikuni have seen an improvement. “There are diseases that are not there now because of these vaccines and medicines,” says Naikuni.
One of the region’s veterinarians, Melita Lein, was born and raised in Kajiado County in a farming community just like Naikuni’s. Growing up, though, he realised there were many more animals than veterinarians to look after them if they fell sick – and animals fell sick more and more often each year. The little veterinary help available was costly, sporadic, far away and didn’t take into account the cultural context of the Maasai or their language, leaving some local farmers feeling isolated. Studies from other parts of Africa suggest that up to 80% of small-scale livestock farmers lack adequate access to veterinary services or have never resorted to veterinarian services for their livestock.
Every day, on his small motorcycle, Lein travels from 10km to over 200km across rugged terrain to remote homesteads, sometimes even in heavy rain, visiting otherwise inaccessible farmers.
“Me sharing the culture with my own people, it has made it easier, explaining things to them,” says Lein. “The work is easier coming from someone who they know and feel is their own.”
He often responds to emergency calls at night and does rounds of routine vaccinations during the day – providing vaccination programs tailored specifically to the needs of the livestock in Kajiado County, as a result of a lot of back and forth between vaccine producers, local government, veterinarians and small-scale farmers.
“We are no longer working in silos, in terms of disease control,” says Lein. The work done “bridges the gap between the farmer and them being able to access vaccination.”
Connecting even the most isolated of farmers to the global vaccine production chain – and making the process simpler and locally sourced – has been at the forefront of GALVmed’s mission in Kenya and the bulk of sub-Saharan Africa.
“We are working with companies and multinationals that have a bit more skin in the game, who are a bit closer to where the problem is,” says Lois Muraguri, GALVmed’s CEO, for veterinarians like Lein to bring to farmers like Naikuni in underdeveloped markets.
So far, they’ve reached 8.6 million annual customers and averted 48.8 million livestock deaths by 2025. And it’s not just about awareness of the vaccine’s existence and the ability to access it, though, says Muraguri. It is about ensuring a vaccine is the right fit local conditions.
“Sometimes you’re doing process improvement, or it could be tweaking something so that it’s specific for the context,” says Muraguri. “Our goal is not only about getting more products into the market, but it’s also about how that market then becomes sustainable.”
For foot-and-mouth disease, for instance, Muraguri’s team supports the development of vaccines that match East African strains specifically, not just global ones. The team also works with manufacturers to make small-volume vaccine packaging for farmers with just a few animals to inoculate, and they explore whether their Newcastle disease vaccines can be given as eye drops, which is simpler for smallholders than injections, or whether dosages can be added to the water the animals drink.
Since it’s often difficult for farmers to understand which diseases strike their animals, Muraguri’s team is also working on combination vaccines that bundle multiple protections into one jab, such as shots that protect livestock against the triad of the PPR, sheep and goat pox, and pleuropneumonia. Three of their multivalent vaccines have just achieved market authorisation.
GALVmed’s approaches have been successful so far, especially in India, where they helped tackle Newcastle disease in backyard chicken flocks. In the area where they intervened, flock sizes increased by 123% within 16 months of the vaccines being implemented.
“That poultry work, there’s quite a good story of our success,” says Neil Gammon, the organisation’s director of funder relations and development. “Now it’s about moving to cattle, sheep and goats. That’s where you still have very low vaccine uptake rates. And so that’s where our focus is going to.”
This article was produced for GALVmed by BBC StoryWorks Commercial Productions. Original article available here.
Photo credit: BBC StoryWorks Commercial Productions.
Livestock are at the heart of rural communities across Africa, providing food, income, and security for millions of families. Yet preventable diseases continue to threaten animal health, livelihoods, and food systems.
The series Animals & Us explores the strong connection between the health of animals and people. The different stories in the series explore the remarkable innovators working to strengthen and protect this valuable connection. In GALVmed’s film, we explore how innovation, collaboration, and vaccination of livestock help protect animals, strengthen communities, and advance One Health.
This video was produced for GALVmed by BBC StoryWorks Commercial Productions.
Livestock farmers in rural communities across Nigeria often face devastating animal disease outbreaks that can destroy their livelihoods within days.
Government leaders, veterinary professionals, development partners, academics, and private sector stakeholders came together from 27th to 30th April in Abuja to deliberate on solutions to the challenges facing the livestock health sector, and more importantly, agree on a shared path forward. Convened by GALVmed in partnership with Ikore, an international development organisation, offering innovative solutions to support sustainable social and enterprise development and the Federal Ministry of Livestock Development (FMLD), the three-day stakeholder engagement marked a significant moment in Nigeria’s veterinary profession. At the centre of the discussions was the validation of the National Roadmap for Veterinary Services in Nigeria (2027–2036), a ten-year strategy designed to modernise animal health systems, strengthen disease preparedness, and support a more resilient livestock sector nationwide.
The gathering was more than a ceremonial policy event. It was a practical working session focused on implementation, coordination, and identifying solutions to the realities facing veterinary services across Nigeria today.
Throughout the engagement, participants examined gaps in improving vaccination delivery, expanding animal identification and traceability systems, addressing emerging livestock disease threats, and advancing the One Health approach that connects animal, human, and environmental health.
There was also strong emphasis on partnerships. Speakers repeatedly stressed that improving veterinary services at national scale will require closer collaboration between government institutions, private sector actors, development organisations, and state-level implementers.
The meeting itself reflected that broad coalition. Participants included senior federal officials, Directors of Veterinary Services from all 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory, development partners, academics, vaccine commercial partners, and leaders from across the veterinary and livestock sectors. Also in attendance were the Honourable Minister of Livestock Development, Idi Mukhtar Maiha, the Chief Veterinary Officer of Nigeria (CVON) Dr Samuel Anzaku, and renowned virologist Professor Oyewale Tomori.
For many attendees, the significance of the moment was clear. In the words of Dr Samuel Anzaku, Chief Veterinary Officer of Nigeria, “This is the first time we are having this kind of gathering since the veterinary profession started in the early 60s. This meeting is more than important; it allows us to chart a way forward for the veterinary profession in Nigeria.”
Beyond animal health, the conversations repeatedly returned to the economic importance of the livestock sector itself. According to projections by the Federal Ministry of Livestock Development, Nigeria’s livestock industry is currently valued at approximately $32 billion, with ambitions to grow the sector significantly over the next decade.
That growth cannot happen without stronger vaccination systems and better last-mile delivery of veterinary services.
GALVmed’s Veterinary Innovations Transforming Animal Health and Livelihoods (VITAL2) project, implemented by Ikore in Nigeria, is working to address those gaps by improving awareness, strengthening vaccine service delivery, and expanding access to vaccines in underserved communities.
Dr Moses Arokoyo, GALVmed’s Nigeria Country Manager, puts it plainly: health is wealth. “GALVmed’s VITAL 2 Project focuses on three major Pillars: animal health advocacy, disease awareness creation, and improved veterinary service delivery even to the last mile. This supports the Federal Ministry of Livestock Development’s NL-GAS Strategy with the newly formed 10-year Road Map for Nigerian Veterinary Service, and we are poised to partner and help grow the livestock industry in Nigeria from $32 billion to the targeted $74 billion through ruminant vaccination.”
For Ikore, the project represents a defining moment. “This marks a significant milestone as we contribute to the transformation the Nigerian livestock industry is set to embark on. We are particularly excited to deliver key components of the VITAL 2 project, with a strong focus on the exemplar areas,” says Ogheneovo Ugbebor, Managing Partner at Ikore.
By the close of deliberations, stakeholders had adopted a series of resolutions focused on strengthening institutional capacity, improving disease surveillance systems, establishing sustainable funding mechanisms, coordinating national vaccination efforts, and expanding public-private partnerships across the livestock value chain. The roadmap also places strong emphasis on digital transformation and embedding One Health principles into long-term sector governance.
The validation of the roadmap represents both progress and responsibility. The real test now lies beyond conference halls and policy documents — in communities where farmers struggle to access timely animal health services, where disease outbreaks continue to threaten livelihoods, and where stronger veterinary systems could have a direct impact on food security, public health, and economic stability.
Blog written by Calista Iheoma Geoffery, Communications Associate at Ikore.
Healthy livestock systems are fundamental to resilient communities, sustainable livelihoods and food security across Africa, yet controllable animal diseases continue to pose serious burdens for small-scale producers.
One such disease is Animal African Trypanosomosis (AAT) which devastates livelihoods across more than 37 African countries, costing economies up to $4.5 billion per year. Despite the impact of the disease, there are currently no vaccines in commercial development, and the current treatments, which have been in use for more than 50 years, are increasingly challenged by treatment failures, drug resistance, and the circulation of falsified or substandard products.
“The success achieved against human African trypanosomiasis shows what is possible when global partners align around a shared goal, and this same unified momentum is now essential to protect the animals that underpin rural livelihoods.” – Alec Evans, African Animal Trypanocide Development Project Leader at GALVmed.
Bringing new tools to the market, although a welcome step, is not enough. Addressing this neglected disease will require coordinated investment in research and commercial development, as well as regulatory harmonisation to accelerate the availability of safe, effective new trypanocides. “I In a landscape marked by treatment failures, limited diagnostic capacity, drug resistance, and the circulation of poor-quality products, GALVmed aims to drive overall change. Its goal is to support the development of a new trypanocide while supporting the systems needed to deliver quality-assured treatments, ensuring they reliably reach livestock keepers, even in the most remote areas.”
GALVmed has entered into a new agreement with the University of Toronto, and Engineered Antigens Inc, a spinoff company by University of Calgary and University of Toronto, as well as Biovet, to further develop a novel haemorrhagic septicaemia vaccine for use in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Under the new HS vaccine advancement effort Biovet will conduct safety and efficacy testing, including in the field, and lead the process to secure market authorisation.
The initial product development was supported by funds from the Livestock Vaccine Innovation Fund of the Canadian International Development Research Centre to a team led by Dr Anthony Schryvers of the University of Calgary. GALVmed will now support the development and commercialisation of the vaccine in collaboration with the University of Toronto and the selected industrialisation partner, Biovet Private Limited, a BSL-3+Ag biocontainment facility supporting animal health vaccine production and large-animal testing in Malur, Karnataka, India.
The candidate vaccine is a novel target identified on the surface of haemorrhagic septicaemia-associated strains of Pasteurella multocida. It has demonstrated robust protection in cattle against lethal challenge with the two serogroups of Pasteurella responsible for HS.
Pasteurella multocida is a bacterial pathogen capable of infecting a wide range of wild and domestic animals, with diverse symptoms. In cattle, infections are primarily associated with bovine respiratory disease (BRD) and haemorrhagic septicaemia. HS is characterized by seasonal outbreaks with a rapid onset and high mortality. The disease has devastating economic and cultural impacts on livestock-keeping communities across sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
While vaccines against both bovine-associated P. multocida diseases are currently available, they are primarily limited to aluminium-adjuvanted whole killed bacteria, known as bacterins, or live attenuated strains. These vaccines offer serogroup specific protection, so responses only against the same strain type as in the vaccine, and can have safety concerns with adverse reactions after administration. In many low- and middle-income countries, HS bacterin vaccines are produced locally and tailored to circulating strains, creating challenges for standardisation of products and subsequent large-scale production, and also consistent quality control.
Dr Steve Wilson, Director of Research and Development at GALVmed said: ”Haemorrhagic septicaemia is a significant issue for cattle and buffalo in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, with current products often having constraints in terms of quality, safety and efficacy against circulating strains. The candidate vaccine developed by the University of Toronto will permit a standardised production process, and have cross-protection efficacy against HS causing Pasteurella strains. Biovet are an established manufacturer of HS vaccines and this new development will provide a next generation solution for their markets in Africa and Asia.”
Professor Trevor Moraes, of the Temerty Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto said: “This subunit-based protein vaccine has shown tremendous promise in protecting cattle from this devastating disease, and we are incredibly excited to advance to the final stage of development toward large-scale production and distribution in the low and middle income regions that need it most.”
Dr Raches Ella, Director at Biovet said: “This collaboration represents an important step toward delivering next-generation protection against haemorrhagic septicaemia. By uniting academic research, development expertise and real-world field testing, we are working to bring innovative and accessible preventive solutions to livestock producers facing this persistent and economically devastating disease.”
“Advancing the HS vaccine requires global vision and collective action. By joining forces with our international partners, we are committed to translate this vision into a reality.” Dr. Jalachari Ella, Director at Biovet said.
By combining academic innovation, development expertise and established manufacturing capacity, the partnership aims to deliver a safe, effective and scalable vaccine solution to help protect livestock, strengthen farmer livelihoods and support sustainable livestock systems in regions where HS remains a major constraint to productivity.
Livestock are more than productive assets—they are a critical source of income, nutrition, resilience, and opportunity for millions of people across Africa. Yet the benefits of livestock production are not experienced equally.
Women are at the heart of livestock care and yet they continue to face significant and persistent barriers to accessing veterinary services, inputs, finance, information, and decision-making power. Overlooking these gendered dynamics is not only detrimental to achieving equality —it also undermines the effectiveness, reach, and sustainability of livestock development efforts.
Recognising this, applying a gender lens to livestock programmes is not an optional add-on, but a strategic necessity. In 2025, GALVmed launched VITAL 2, a five-year programme to improve ruminant vaccination rates in Kenya, Tanzania, and Nigeria. The programme works through private sector-driven approaches to strengthen markets for high-quality vaccines while complementing government vaccination efforts. Crucially, VITAL 2 is a gender-intentional investment, designed to ensure that gender-related barriers and norms are identified and addressed so that women are not excluded from the benefits of ruminant vaccination as markets and delivery systems expand.
The gender component is fully integrated into VITAL 2’s delivery model, with the aim of improving understanding of the barriers and norms affecting vaccine uptake and identifying how project components can adapt to better include and benefit women.
A Structured and Evidence-Based Approach
The VITAL 2 gender plan includes targeted activities in selected sites that explore gender-transformative approaches. A three-country gender landscaping exercise in Kenya, Nigeria, and Tanzania will provide the foundation, mapping the technical and socio-institutional barriers to livestock vaccination, alongside the norms shaping these systems. It will also identify the most meaningful intersecting factor within in each community- such as age, ethnicity, religion, membership within cooperatives and conservancies – that shape women’s experiences and inform where gender transformative activities (GTAs) can be most effectively implemented.
Building on this, the targeted GTAs will be run in selected exemplar sites, where community dialogue and norm-shifting activities can be tested in structured environments. The purpose is to generate a comparative understanding of what works, for whom, and under what conditions.
Alongside these GTAs, an action research and evaluation agenda will track shifts in decision-making, household dynamics, participation in vaccination, and women’s ability to access services. A suite of gender indicators will be measured through baseline and endline surveys, supported by qualitative research that captures stories of change. This mixed methodology will allow VITAL 2 to monitor not only whether women are more involved in vaccination but also how these shifts are experienced and sustained within households and communities.
The insights from this research will offer practical evidence on norms and barriers, and potential responses that can inform VITAL 2 delivery teams and partners, while also contributing to a clearer understanding of how gender dynamics affect uptake in low-coverage contexts, ensuring women are not overlooked in the expansion of ruminant vaccination.
Integrating a gender lens into livestock programme design is not just a matter of equity—it is a pathway to more effective, sustainable, and impactful interventions that achieve stronger outcomes.
Gender-intentional programmes like VITAL 2 help ensure that livestock systems deliver benefits for everyone, enhancing animal health, productivity, resilience, and livelihoods across communities. By doing so, we move closer to livestock development that is inclusive, transformative, and capable of creating lasting impact.
For small-scale livestock producers in the global south, a goat, cow, or flock of chickens are not just animals – they are the foundation of their livelihoods. Livestock provide food, income, and security, and losing them to preventable diseases can be devastating.
In a world where over a billion people depend on livestock, improving animal health is critical not only to protect individuals but also to ensure sustainable agricultural systems, food security and safety, and entire communities’ well-being and progression.
GALVmed continues to collaborate with partners and key public and private stakeholders to transform the lives of small-scale producers across Africa and South Asia through improved animal health. Our approach remains the same: enhancing the availability, accessibility, awareness and adoption of high-quality veterinary medicines to reduce productivity and animal losses from preventable diseases. And how does this translate into tangible actions?
Improving availability: By researching, improving and developing much needed animal health products and solutions suited to the needs of small-scale livestock producers.
Increasing accessibility: By easing barriers in the regulatory and policy environment ensuring the needed products reach the markets and are accessible and affordable to small-scale livestock producers.
Increasing awareness and adoption: By using appropriate channels to reach the last mile providing information and veterinary medicines to small-scale livestock producers.
Increasing understanding: By providing practical data and information from the small-scale livestock producer field to measure impact and facilitate data-driven decisions.
Over the years, GALVmed through its partners, has implemented impactful programmes across Africa and South Asia, leading to significant achievements:
Approximately 8.6 million cumulative annual customers over the period 2014 – 2025. (*)
3.8 billion doses of livestock vaccines, therapeutics and other animal health products sold to small-scale producers across Africa and South Asia from 2014 to 2025.
Approximately US$157.9 million in poultry deaths averted, from 2014 to 2025.
US$583.2 million in total net economic benefits to SSPs from the sale of vaccines and animal health products. Of this, US$260.1 million represents additional net economic benefit generated through GALVmed’s efforts to expand market availability and catalyse new adoption.
GALVmed will continue to work closely with partners to make effective animal health products accessible across sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, advancing our mission to safeguard livestock health to consequently improve human lives.
(*) This measure does not currently account for the same SSP customer buying products year after year, and therefore contains an element of double-counting for multi-year time series.
The East African Community Mutual Recognition Procedure (EAC MRP) is a cornerstone of regulatory harmonisation in African animal health. Established to streamline the registration of veterinary medicines across EAC Partner States, the MRP allows for simultaneous application of marketing authorisations in multiple countries, reducing registration times, increasing access to multiple markets, and therefore contributing to bringing quality animal health products to market quicker and easier.
The MRP has now taken an important step forward. Its mandate, which included veterinary pharmaceuticals and vaccines, has expanded to include ectoparasiticides, aquatic animal medicines, and animal nutritional supplements—broadening its impact and strengthening its relevance across both livestock and aquaculture sectors.
Over the years, the MRP has facilitated the registration of 24 high-quality veterinary products, reinforcing its value as a practical and trusted regulatory tool. Among these achievements is the registration of a quadrivalent Foot and mouth disease (FMD) vaccine that protects against the circulating East Africa FMD virus serotypes.
The expansion of scope is accompanied by important technical updates. The pharmaceutical guideline has been reviewed to incorporate requirements for innovator products. In addition, the guideline for Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) inspection of veterinary medicine manufacturers has been endorsed and is already being used. Applicants are advised to refer to the new guidelines, which are available here.
By providing a predictable and coordinated pathway for product registration, the EAC MRP continues to accelerate the availability of safe and effective veterinary medicines—supporting livestock productivity, safeguarding food security, and protecting the livelihoods of small-scale livestock producers across East Africa.
