National Veterinary Services of South Africa to roll-out PVS-based self-evaluation of provincial veterinary services following OIE training in Pretoria

Some 40 South African veterinary professionals took part in the first national OIE PVS Pathway orientation training workshop, at the Onderstepoort Veterinary Research (OVR) institute, north of Pretoria, last week. The Republic of South Africa is governed under a devolution system with nine Provinces, each enjoying considerable autonomy.

Given these considerations, the OIE Delegate of South Africa had requested for PVS training from the OIE to better enable it to undertake PVS self-evaluation, including at the provincial level, to supplement its OIE PVS Evaluation reports at national level.

Earlier such OIE PVS training courses have been conducted in the Americas, Europe, Asia and the Pacific, and indeed in Africa. For the latter, this workshop represented the fourth time PVS training had been delivered, following a first national workshop in Addis Ababa in March 2019 and two regional workshops in Johannesburg and Dakar in June and July 2019 respectively. However it was the first training in Africa to be conducted using the recently published 7th Edition of the OIE PVS Evaluation Tool (2019)

This latest workshop brought together senior veterinary officials from the national veterinary authority, under the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (DAFF), from all nine provincial veterinary services, as well as from various veterinary educational establishments (University of Pretoria, North-West University, University of South Africa [UNISA], and the Tsolo College of Agriculture), veterinary laboratories (Onderstepoort Veterinary Research institute), the private sector (through the National Animal Health Forum) and the South African Veterinary Council (SAVC).

Facilitated by the OIE’s Regional Activities Department and the Sub-Regional Representation for Southern Africa, the team of trainers, consisting of Drs. Moetapele Letshwenyo, Emilio Leon and Patrick Bastiaensen, facilitated a series of practical exercises with the aim of familiarising participants with the structure and logic of the PVS tool, leading towards a mock-evaluation in a hypothetical country and closing with an all-South Africa working group session in which the broad outline of a self-evaluation programme was laid out, the first round of which is to be completed by March 2020 in all provinces. Except for the costs related to the participation of the team of OIE trainers, the workshop was entirely funded from sources identified by the Government of South Africa