The achievement of a National One Health (OH) Strategy was not a walk in the park for Namibia, experts noted Tuesday 25th March, but every effort was worth it.
A succession of hurdles had been identified early on, which initially made the journey appear more daunting than it actually ended up being, and only extremely dedicated, and painstaking efforts towards bringing together relevant stakeholders, whose eyes were on the prize, would guarantee a positive result.
“We needed to know if we really were in need of the strategy, and we therefore had to carefully identify the gaps that were there,” says Iyaloo Mwaningange, the Deputy Director and Field Epidemiologist, Ministry of Health and Social Services, Namibia. “We therefore had to do serious reflections before moving forward.” It helped.
In a Tuesday 25 March, 2025 webinar titled What Does It Take to Develop A National One Health Strategy? Namibia’s Experience, two of Namibia’s One Health experts, Ms Mwaningange and Prof Simon Angombe, the Associate Dean, School of Agriculture and Fisheries Sciences, University of Namibia, detailed their journey to this trailblazing One Health Strategy.
Namibia, a country of just over 3 million, has a majority of its population living in rural areas and practicing livestock production and subsistence farming. The country is, however, plagued by zoonotic disease outbreaks.
“Yet marginalized communities are often excluded from crucial health and environmental initiatives,” Prof Angombe lamented. “Our baseline survey showed that the OH landscape in Namibia is fragmented, with actors working in silos. Academic curricula have always lacked OH-specific training.”
The country’s One Health landscape needed a rethink. It needed speed as well, which demanded that those with technical knowhow and who understood the urgency took the lead.
In the webinar, Prof Angombe and Ms Mwaningange explained the rigorous process that led to achievement of the strategy, amid systemic bumps they managed to overcome. Increasingly dire circumstances triggered the first response about a decade ago.
“In 2016, Namibia was evaluated under the World Health Organization’s International Health Regulations’ (WHO-IHR) Framework and was found to have limited capacity in mechanisms for responding to zoonoses. This was a tipping point; we decided we needed to close this gap,” said Ms Mwaningange.
Since, a lot has been achieved.
“We conducted a strength, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) analysis from the existing OH environment to prioritize the OH strategic objectives or pillars in the OH strategy,” Prof Angombe said. “We use KPIs to assess the performance against predetermined goals. That is how we measure, monitor and evaluate the progress and outcomes.”
There was a vulnerability assessment and analysis to identify the hazards facing Namibia and all relevant stakeholders, from human, animal and environmental health, were involved. This helped in scoring which of these facets posed the highest risk to Namibia, and what, therefore, needed prioritization.
The Capacitating One Health in Eastern and Southern Africa (COHESA) project brought in stakeholders and interest groups for the situational analysis. The government agencies brought stakeholders as well for these deliberations.
Initially, as the interested parties increased in number, it was hard to kickstart activity.
“We struggled to understand each other’s mandates. We also faced the problem of explaining to, and convincing, our leadership to understand the need to prioritize meetings with stakeholders,” said Ms Mwaningange.
Through interactive processes, such as net-mapping, which was ran by COHESA, a space that brought down these walls was provided. The net-mapping identified the Ministry of Health as the most influential stakeholder, and so they coordinated the process towards development of the strategy.
Through deliberate support from The Ministries involved, including the highly influential Ministry of Health, the One Health strategy in the country was possible to achieve within a short time. There was support from senior management in government agencies, with buy-in from senior policy makers.
“That has always been very crucial and very encouraging. People were keen to support. There was a strong desire,” Brighton Gorejena, a lecturer at The School of Veterinary Medicine, Department of Production Animal Clinical Studies at University of Namibia, said.
Going ahead, a lot still needs to be done.
“The One Health Tripartite approach in Namibia would involve close collaboration between the Ministry of Health and Social Services, the Ministry of Agriculture, Water and Land Reform, and the Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Tourism. This integrated effort is crucial for addressing the interconnected health challenges the country faces,” says Prof Angombe.
He also says that one of the challenges that can be expected in the future, in implementation of the strategy, is institutionalization barriers. “We need to keep finding ways on how to overcome these barriers that are there between human, animal and environmental health.”
He advocates for increased allocation of funds to One Health, curriculum audit to include One Health, fostering of improved ways to communicate and collaborate, and ways to ensure there is heightened community engagement.
Ms Mwaningange says that the goal is to get out of high-level meetings and go to the people.
“We try to keep away from workshops. We want to target community focal persons, and the service providers, while at the same time doing advocacy and upstream activities. We will also work with Ministry of Education and academia to implement curricular on health issues.”
There is no message Namibia communicates louder than that it, truly, can be done.
By Peter Theuri, Digital Communications Officer, ISAAA AfriCenter