Technical Assistance to Communication and PrivatisationLegislation.

Rinderpest was first introduced to the African continent in 1841 and it first appeared south of theSahara in 1884, after infected cane were imported from India. The re salting epidemic killed over90% of the indigenous cattle and. wildlife population in Sub-Saharan Africa and up to 75% ofEgyptian cattle and buffaloes.During the 1960s and 1970s, the Joint Project Cam-pain. (JP15) resulted in the vaccination of over70 million cattle with the tissue culture vaccine. The JP15 campaign ended in 1969 and 1976 inWest Africa and East Africa, respectively; by this time, the number of rinderpest outbreaks haddropped substantially. As it became clear that rinderpest was spreading once again throughoutAfrica, OAU/LBAR expressed its concern for the need to renew control efforts. After wide-rancrinc,consultations between national governments and donors, especially the European Communities, thePan-African Rinderpest Campaign (PARC) was officially launched as a continent-wide controlcampaig.n.The Pan-African Rinderpest Campaign (PARC) was financed from 1986 by the European Union,principally through Regional and National Programmes of the European Development Fund (EDF).It consisted of two parts: one part supported the Interafrican Bureau for Animal Resources (1BAR) ofthe Organisation of African Unity (OAU ), which was responsible for the co-ordination of theproject; the other part was a collection of proo-rammes at a national level which were negotiated on acase by case basis with individual countries. In total, 35 countries from West, Central and EastAfrica were involved in the PARC programme under various funding agreements.The aim of the programme was to :(i) control and ultimately eradicate rinderpest from the continent ;revitalize and restructure livestock services, through dialogue with nationalgovernments, to make them self-sustaining ;and(iii) provide appropriate improvments to husbandry methods.By 1999, more than 12 years after PARC started, 465.5 million doses of rinderpest vaccine had beenused and no rinderpest has been reported in West and Central Africa for more than ten years. Thenumber of countries officially known to harbour rinderpest or to be suspected to have unreportedcases dropped from 18 in 1986 (when PARC started) to just two in 1998.By 1999, seventeen countries had declared complete or zonal provisional freedom from rindero estaccording to the Oli-. pathway. There was also signif.car.t progress on policy reforms and privatizationof animal health services: 23 of the 35 countries have adopted cost recovery measures while in 20countries, some form of privatization was initiated, including the use of community-based deliverysystems of veterinary services. An economic impact assessment ofPARC showed that rinderpest is adisease of major economic importance in the African continent: