One Health and Public Health in Africa

One Health (OH) recognizes the health of humans, domestic and wild animals, plants, and the wider environment (including ecosystems) are closely linked and interdependent.. The OH concept has now developed into an approach aimed at achieving common public health goals. One Health has taken a renewed importance, particularly with the COVID-19 pandemic further demonstrating the need to fast-track the operationalization of One Health in strengthening the public health system’s resilience. For the most part, the discussions related to One Health have been held within the academic fraternity with limited engagements of governments or evidence of effective intersectoral cooperation and action. Furthermore, the few one health initiatives undertaken for disease prevention and control have had limited monitoring and evaluation of its health and food systems outcomes, making it challenging to effectively make a case to policy makers on the benefits of OH for promoting public health. There remains ongoing questions on what governance mechanism would best promote intersectoral cooperation and how best to operationalize the One Health approach, including scaling capacity-building for implementation in the global south that already have a high burden of zoonotic diseases and have experienced large disease outbreaks in the last decade. The implementation of OH in the Global south is an important component of global health security. Effective implementation and monitoring of OH in the African region should also be prioritized by both resource-constrained and resource-rich nations.


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