Crowdsourcing: Rapid Community Animal Disease and AMR/U surveillance

We intend to utilize a phone APP using a crowdsourcing platform to obtain real time data from farmers and community on animal disease and AMU/R. Alerts will be sent directly to local veterinarians and animal health workers in-built in the APP for immediate response to reduce antimicrobial misuse by farmers.

Justine Alinaitwe; Supervisor Animal Production, Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA)

Recent reports have indicated a steady increase in misuse of antibiotics among food animals in Sub-Saharan Africa, including Uganda with subsequent increase in antimicrobial resistance (Silbergeld, 2019). Many of the antibiotics classified as critically important for human health are also being used in food animals due to lack of knowledge on specific disease management (Manyi-Loh et al.,2018). On pig farms in Uganda, for example, antibiotics are erratically used to treat diarrhoea regardless of cause and to prevent African swine fever even though its a viral disease and antibiotics would have no effect (Silbergeld, 2019). This is attributed to a lack of information and poor access to extension services to aid decision making.

Inadequate information poses a great risk of antimicrobial misuse by farmers whose practices remain unchecked thus escalating antimicrobial resistance at farm level (Nayiga et al., 2020). 

The target audience is smallholder pig farmers, local veterinarians and community animal health workers. 

The farmers will get better quality extension services and improve productivity with reduced use of antibiotics. While the local veterinarians and community animal health workers will get real time alerts on suspected animal disease outbreaks in their locality aiding quick response and precision use of antibiotics on farms. 

All stakeholders will be involved from the initial stage of drafting the app, testing its use and continuously improving it to provide the best data. The APP will foster collaborative creation of data on suspected disease outbreaks and collectively share problem solving ideas on disease management. 

This innovation will provide the following public goods: -

1. Improved access to public animal health extension services 
2. Free-to-use database on AMR/U in the animal heath sector
3. A community-based animal disease surveillance system

We expect this innovation to help farmers better understand animal disease processes and have expert input in disease management on their farms thus aiding prudent use of antibiotics for therapeutic purposes only. Rapid reporting and instant response from animal health experts will improve disease management on farms. Most smallholder farmers have low education backgrounds and are mostly left out of critical decision making processes. As such farmers utilize drugs on farms to treat their own animals based on their own perceptions with no expert input. Limited access to extension services fuels excessive use of antibiotics on smallholder farms for prophylaxis, growth promotion and indiscreet treatment of many disease symptoms without proper diagnosis (Bradford et al., 2022)

The innovation phone APP would be designed and drafted after conducting a needs assessment conducted through a participatory appraisal with farmers, veterinarians and community animal health workers. This would ensure critical concerns are captures and addressed by the APP.

APP development with provision for local language input would then be developed and tested first with a small group of stakeholders then improved

It would then be piloted in Kampala in the first 6 months of the project then scaled up to cover Masaka, Mukono and Mpigi districts which have the highest populations of pigs and smallholder pig farmers in Uganda over a period of 2 years. It would allow for continuous learning and improvement to better address AMR/U at community level.

We will conduct a baseline survey to establish current parameters for volume of antibiotics used on selected smallholder pig farms and purpose of use. 

We plan to use traffic data of how many people are installing the APP and using it; number of datasets generated for animal disease surveillance over a given period of time; number of animal diseases reported and volume of antibiotics used before and after the intervention on the selected farms. Gauge whether disease incidence reduced on these farms with increased access to animal health extension services.  

1. Animal health infrastructure at community level is limited with few public veterinarians; We intend to recruit and train community animal health workers and leverage on existing farmers associations to mobilize farmers and  communities and promote the technology
2. Capacity building will be conducted for community animal health workers and veterinarians on ICT solutions for e-extension services
3. Cost of maintaining the APP overtime may be costly; farmers and community animal health workers will be enticed to pay a small maintenance fee to use the app after the first year of the project attaching subsidized services and products available through the APP. e.g. vaccine supply, technical trainings, marketing services, etc.

The initial cost of APP development, content development, implementation and maintenance are exceptionally high. However, with sufficient research, an APP that delicately addresses pertinent issues can be sustainable over time. We have applied for this challenge to obtain the initial capital required to implement this innovation. 

Main barriers to address

• Limited access to reliable information on community AMR/U on-farm
• Few public veterinarians available to provide animal health services
• Unnecessary excessive use of antibiotics by farmers due to limited access to extension services and poor animal disease reporting and surveillance system

We would like to collaborate with: - 

• FAO; since they have established a similar application and would help provide guidance effective implementation and design
• ICARS; this organization has funded and carried out a lot of research on AMR/U and would provide technical support on appropriateness of innovation 
• Ministry of Agriculture to address involved policy issues to create an enabling environment for sustainable implementation.