The Sunday News
Judith Phiri, Business Reporter
THE Transforming Zimbabwe’s Animal Health and Food Safety Systems for the Future (SAFE) project is developing 26 anchor animal health management centres around the country in a bid to improve service delivery, while bringing the products and services closer to the farmers in an affordable way.
SAFE project is part of a larger EU-funded Zimbabwe Agricultural Growth Programme (ZAGP) that was launched in the country in June 2019.
The 40 million euro initiative is complemented by the Ministry of Lands, Agriculture, Fisheries, Water and Rural Resettlement.
According to the latest newsletter from the ZAGP, SAFE will be developing the 26 anchor animal health management centres across 20 districts in eight rural provinces.
“Each centre is being capacitated to be able to support at least three to eight satellite management centres catering for a combined total of 15–35 dip tanks.
“The 26 centres have a total estimated cattle population of 624 000+ owned by about 130 000 households.”
ZAGP said the design of the centre model is premised around improved service delivery to bring the products and services closer to the farmers in an affordable way.
It said that the availability of the improved services is expected to lead to increased livestock productivity which will in turn motivate farmers and other value-chain players.
“SAFE is currently setting up two pilot centres in Bindura and Makoni districts in Mashonaland Central and Manicaland provinces, respectively.
“These are expected to be in operation by 31 August 2021 while the other 24 are expected to be operational by the end of November 2021,” said ZAGP.
It noted that the services to be offered include public good services disease outbreak investigations; sample collection and treatment; livestock census; scheduled farm inspections; farmer training, extension and advisory services.
Other services are commercial services cattle dipping; vaccinations; animal remedies and equipment sales; animal movement control; branding and tagging.
To date, ZAGP said SAFE interventions have been laboratory capacitation for provincial and national laboratories, food inspection kits at ports of entry and urban centres.
“SAFE has also done information management systems for livestock surveillance, port health and food safety.
“The project has done tick born disease vaccine production at the Central Veterinary Laboratory and rapid test kits for six commercial ports of entry.”
The overall objective of the SAFE project, is to transform Zimbabwe’s animal health, sanitary and phytosanitary/food safety systems for improved livestock productivity, food safety and consumer safety to enhance market access.
SAFE is aligned to the locations of the ZAGP livestock value chains and the major ports of entry into Zimbabwe.
The SAFE project is being led by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations working in partnership with the Department of Veterinary Services, in the Ministry of Lands, Agriculture, Water and Rural Resettlement as well as the Department of Environmental Health in the Ministry of Health and Child Care.
