81285647-Policy Design & Technical Assessment for integrated One Health Data Governance & Management in Africa

The One Health Data Alliance Africa project (OHDAA) is a development project managed by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH, and commissioned by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) under the umbrella of One Health (OH) intended to run from January 2022 till December 2024. OH is a holistic, interdisciplinary approach that is concerned with the interactions and interdependencies between humans, animals and the environment and further domains such as food security and agriculture/livestock/fisheries production, water resource management and water supply, and the preservation of biodiversity. OH-related data is mostly related to zoonosis, epi-/pandemics, foodborne diseases and AMR and such data has largely remained in sector silos and can therefore not be brought together to create information and digital intelligence, for instance, through data science-based algorithms or machine learning. Although several institutions possess information systems that process data related to their respective mandate, they generally don"t allow access to their information by third parties organizations or individuals. To address the gap of OH governance and management, several African Union member states, have established OH desks or OH focal points in public institutions in an attempt to harmonize information related to human, animal and environmental health. Nevertheless, the integration of data and information from different sectors remains rudimentary and is not yet sufficient for evidence-based OH governance and management. The OHDAA intends to address this fundamental issue by establishing OH information platforms for integrated data analysis to strengthen the capacity of African countries to react to unforeseen health challenges in future. The need for OHDAA is informed by the socio-economic impacts of African governments" COVID-19 containment measures-lockdowns, establishment shutdowns, transportation bans, curfews, etc. that diminished the incomes of formal and informal businesses and subsequently countless African households. OHDAA intends to integrate socio-economic data, including increasingly sophisticated analysis to enable decision makers in understanding the socio-economic dimensions of decisions and assist them in streamlining their actions towards improving the lives of the people. The end goal of OHDAA is to maintain and improve the health of the African population through swift and focused prevention and control action in response to emerging and ongoing health risks and emergencies within the intersectoral OH framework. OHDAA will achieve its objectives by relying on the African Union Interafrican Bureau for Animal Resources (AU-IBAR), which manages the inception and completion of the project with support from contractor and other partners like Africa CDC, Health Information Exchange Technical Working Groups (OH-TWG) etc. to establish project scope as well as achieve delivery of necessary services. The overall objective of this tender is to improve digitalised OH governance and management in sub-Saharan Africa by ensuring that the fundamentals- comprising a OH information policy and a OH information architecture- for the structure, pan-African exchange and utilisation of OH information is endorsed by the African Union; to prepare a foundation for implementation of OH information platforms at continental, regional and national level for performing OH data analyses and use cases; and to develop the foundations-comprising competency profiles and associated qualification materials-for qualifying African specialists in building, operating and maintaining OH information platforms with information processing services.