Training of ARIS advanced end users for Anglophone Countries of Eastern, Southern and selected West African Countries

Peste des Petits Ruminants (PPR) devastates sheep and goats in Africa, causing 80–100% mortality, economic losses, and threats to food security, especially for women and youth. The African Union aims to eradicate it by 2030 via the FAO/WOAH Global Strategy and Pan-African Programme 2023–2027, relying on AU-IBAR's ARIS platform (launched as ARIS-1 in 2002, ARIS-2 in 2013, and modern ARIS-3) for data management, PPR response, vaccination, surveillance, and other transboundary diseases like FMD, LSD, AI, and rabies.

AU-IBAR is rolling out ARIS Advanced End-User Training, following Ouagadougou 2025 for Francophone regions, with a proposed Nairobi workshop (31 March–3 April 2026) for Anglophone Eastern/Southern Africa. This will transfer skills to national coordinators for PPR eradication, cascade training to sub-national users, ensure data accuracy for decision-making, and boost broader livestock health resilience.

2. Objective To strengthen the capacity of Anglophone Eastern and Southern African countries to manage and use ARIS as an advanced animal resources information system, with robust data-quality (QA/QC) practices, thereby improving the quality, timeliness and use of information for surveillance, PPR eradication efforts, control of other priority TADs and evidence-based decision-making in animal health and livestock development.

 3. Specific objectives The specific objectives are as follows: 

• Equip advanced end users with practical skills to utilise ARIS for data entry, validation, basic cleaning and analysis, so as to generate accurate, timely and relevant information on animal resources (with a focus on PPR and other priority TADs) to support evidence-based decision-making, planning and policy development. 

• Operationalise and promote the use of newly developed ARIS modules, in order to enhance cross-module data integration and analysis across the livestock subsector and better support PPR eradication and the management of other priority transboundary animal diseases