Smallholders’ food security heavily relies on their livestock, critical assets for coping with shocks and in exchange for income. Support to the smallholder farmers, including livestock owners is critical to enabling affordability and access to animal protein for large proportion of the population, and to women empowerment. Livestock diseases and their related costs of management are ranked as the biggest economic threat to the livelihood of poor rural farmers and livestock owners. With increasing climate variability and change, livestock migration is increasingly common in arid and semi-arid parts of the world, increasing the risk of animal disease transmission.

In Nigeria, the issue of livestock diseases is of utmost importance to poor rural and peri-urban farmers, with over 20 million Nigerian households (est. 120 million people) relying on their livestock for nutrition. Nigerian women are key stakeholders in poultry and small ruminants value chains.
Diseases are mitigated by setting up and maintaining surveillance and control systems. However, many countries, including Nigeria, need technological inputs, improved animal health services, and better disease surveillance infrastructure, vaccines production systems, and research data.
To tackle these issues, the EU funded a new project called LIDISKI. This project aims to Integrate Knowledge collected from actors in the animal health sector to provide tools and know-how to implement sustainable Surveillance and control strategies against Livestock Diseases. Actors to be involved closely in this project include members of Communities Animal Health Workers (CAHWs), veterinary services and their commanding ministries, the National Veterinary Research Institute (NVRI), field veterinarian, herders, poultry owners, and private livestock businesses.
The project focuses on two of the most impacting diseases in Nigeria:

The project will work in target areas of central and north Nigeria to develop and test tools to be used for animal disease surveillance across Nigeria and possibly beyond.

The whole methodology of the project is based on two central tenets:

1. Local actors need to gain competency and benefit from new tools to maintain sustainable surveillance and control of diseases.
2. Participatory approaches, integrating local culture and knowledge and socio-economic context are fundamental to engage communities and ensure success of surveillance and control strategies.

In Nigeria, many livestock owners prioritize animal health and are ready to pay for vaccination, and therefore there is a high demand for animal health services. This demand provides an opportunity for local revenues and private businesses associated to animal health activities, and ways to sustainable surveillance and control activities.

Based on this, the project is developed in four actions: