 I'll make us a presentation titled Gender in One Health, Reflections from Two Rift Valley Fever Research Projects. I hope you can see my slides, OK? Yes, you're good to go. OK. And so by way of giving a background for the benefit of those who might not be aware what Rift Valley Fever is. So this is a viral genotic disease that is caused by the Rift Valley virus. And it is a mosquito-borne disease that is climate-sensitive. In East Africa, it has been associated with above-normal rains and are flooding. It affects domestic ruminants. These are mainly cattle-shaped boats and canals. And transmission in livestock is two bites of infected mosquitoes. Occurrence is characterized by mass abortions. Transmission in humans is mainly through infected animal tissue and secretions. And this is the route by which severe cases in humans are also acquired. And mosquitoes have a role to play in causing mild infections. So the management measures include quarantines banned on livestock, trade, and also banned on livestock slaughter, as well as trade in livestock products. And vector control. So livestock vaccination before an outbreak is the most effective method of controlling RVF, but this is done irregularly. So I'll give examples from the two projects. The first is on community adaptation to Rift Valley Fever in Baringo County, Kenya. So this study took place in Baringo North, Baringo Central, and Baringo South sub-counties of Baringo County. And can be seen in the map. We categorize the study site into four zones. We have the site from where we have Lake Baringo and Lake Bogoria as the lowland zone, followed by the midland zone, followed by the highland. And then the extreme zone is the riverine zone that runs along River Kerrio. So the risk factors that we established in the study site when conducting this work was that our community members did keep the susceptible species. The lowland zone was prone to flooding. And also cases of Rift Valley Fever had been reported earlier before we conducted this study. So we also established that community members had limited knowledge of RVF etiology and its transmission patterns. And here is a low understanding of how the human, animal, and environment interfaces interact leading to RVF occurrence. We also observed that there would be risk in the event of an RVF outbreak coming from the consumption patterns of meats and blood for food and also consumption of animal products from sick and dead animals. And these we established were seen one as a means of providing food and also two as a means of mitigating the losses that come with disease and the loss of an animal. We also established that there would be risk coming from the centrality of livestock products when it comes to caregiving of the sick. For example, we find that milk, aside from being a food, it is also used to administer medicines, particularly to children. We find that meat is considered culturally acceptable and respectful food for somebody that is unwell or has been unwell for a while. And meat stock is used to administer both biomedical and herbal medicines to adults. Also, we did establish that there was a culture where there are an extract called ayande and this is an extract from a good woman is believed to be medicinal and it is given to sick people. And the reason why it is considered medicinal is the assumption that because goats being browsers feed from many plants, most of them medicinal. Therefore, it means whatever that can be found in their room and carries medicinal properties and is therefore upon slaughter extracted and given to sick people. So I also found that there was a challenge of poor disposal of dead animals and fetuses. And one we've seen an option has been consumption, but then there are others who discarded this in the open or fed to dogs or practiced burying or burying. Now, burying was not so popular, but burying did occur and also established that there were contestations in burying as a means of disposal of sick or dead animals, particularly in the lowland zone, because the community residing in the area had a cultural belief that interment is only for human bodies and therefore you cannot do the same for animal bodies, so to speak. And then we also established that in the event of an outbreak, the current livestock management practices would also put the people at risk and this includes handling sick livestock with their hands or abouting animals with their hands and the use of biomedical and herbal medicines in self-treating of livestock. Here we established that most farmers do not rely on vets for treatment of sick livestock. They do eat themselves either using herbal medicines or biomedical medicines. So this section shows the engagement in risk practices and what we can see is that we found that men were more likely to engage in risk practices around consumption, around slaughter of sick animals or skinning of dead animals, also engaging in disposal and also the whole dimension of treating sick livestock and acquiring the reputed services around that. So other risk factors that we established being that we looked at how these intersections with other factors, one in terms of location, we found that people from the high land zone practiced less risk practices than those in the riverine midline and low land zones. And those from the low land zones practiced more risk practices than any of the categories. By ethnicity, we established that the pastoral community that resided in the low land zone practiced more risk practices than the agro pastoral community that resided in the riverine midland and high land zone. We also established that the likelihood of engaging in safe practices increased with knowledge of risk practices. However, age, marital status, number of children in the household, education level household type and the main livelihood activities that interviewees engaged in were not found to influence risk to RVF. So in terms of implications for RVF management and control in this study, we established that RVF exposure is likely to follow a gender division of labor pattern, production systems and geographic location. We also established that in outbreak times, there's a possibility of a clash between public health measures, cultural practices around foods, feeding, caregiving of sick people and disposal of sick and dead livestock. And therefore, we thought that having continuous contextualized awareness creation on risk factors of RVF and other zoonotic diseases will be useful in these communities. So for more of this work, you can get this paper. It's an open access paper. The second study is focused on gendered barriers to livestock vaccine uptake in Kenya and Uganda. The study in Kenya took place in Muranga County and Kuala County while in Uganda. It took place in Arua and Ibanda districts. So we did establish that there were extrinsic and intrinsic barriers that prevented farmers from accessing livestock vaccines. And when I say farmers here, I mean both men and women farmers. So the extrinsic barriers included the cost of the vaccine, the choice of vaccination points by the veterinary departments, distances that farmers have to take to go to those set vaccination points, the waiting times when they are going to seek the service, the durations for which the vaccination campaigns are set, whether it is one day or two day, vaccine quantities available, vaccine side effects, and also available infrastructure for restraining animals during the vaccination exercise, the number of veterinary officers available. And this had a direct impact on the waiting times in the vaccination points. We also found that another extrinsic barrier was a vaccination campaign information dissemination strategies. If these were not well done, then it meant the information did not spread as far as it was intended to. And also provision of vaccines when diseases have already spread and also irregular provision of vaccines. Intrinsic barriers, these are the ones that were within the control of community members, included a lack of or limited access to vaccination campaigns, depending on the ability to reach where this information is disseminated from, a lack of awareness on the importance of vaccine, different types of fears. For example, a fear of an animal or one's animal getting disease from coming to contact with other animals, one needle being shared among many animals in the vaccination process, a fear of vaccine side effects, fear of being shamed by other community members for having poor animals with poor health, fear of losing the animals in the process of taking them to and from the vaccination points and also in the vaccination points and also fear of attracting theft, especially when one had animals that were admirable. And then we found that there were challenges with moving livestock to vaccination points and restraining them for vaccination, as well as mistrust of vaccines and veterinary personnel. And this led to a lot of vaccine hesitancy. And then beliefs, this could be religious. For example, we did come across a Christian sect book that did not believe in the use of biomedical medicine, interventions both for human and livestock and therefore would not present their livestock for vaccination, as well as other cultural beliefs like having totem animals, where vaccination was seen as interfering with their sanctity and their space in their cultural meaning. And then we also found that livestock ownership conflicts and preference for curative and preventive care services did contribute. And here the preference was for curative services because you're treating something that you can see as opposed to preventing services, preventive services, which are for something that is not there and might probably not occur anyway. So the key barriers for men and women in this study areas in Murangah we established that for men, their key barriers one was the choice of the vaccination place and two the cost of the vaccine. And this for them were an issue because they added up the cost of the direct and the indirect costs of accessing vaccines and being their breadwinner, the role of providing the finances for this was mainly theirs. For women, the choice of the vaccination place was their biggest barrier, being that the farmers that we went to kept dairy cattle that were zero grazed. So moving these animals that are not accustomed to moving lengthy distances was quite a challenge for women who are mostly left with this task. In Kuala we established for men that two challenges carried almost similar weight and this is the lack of the infrastructure to hold livestock during the vaccination process and access to information. Same case was for women, but for women the lack of information was more dire than the lack of the vaccination infrastructure. And then in Ibanda, Uganda, for men we established that the cost of vaccine was the main barrier for men. For women cost was an issue, but their case was a lot more interesting because they had more intrinsic issues that were affecting them and these were around access to information and having limited capacity to make decision over which livestock to be vaccinated. For Arua cost of vaccine was the main issue. So we were interested in pushing back and trying to understand this inter-household decision making pattern and how it influences vaccine optics. So for this we established that when there's a call to have animals vaccinated in male-headed households with men living locally that is both spouses are at home within the same vicinity all or most of the time. In Muranga, in Muranga and Arua, men primarily made decisions, but these were in true to an extent influenced by women. Whereas in Ibanda and Kuala only men made this decision. So women were not involved. In de facto female-headed households and these are households where the male head of household lives away from the home. In Muranga, Kuala and Ibanda all of these areas the decisions around vaccination were primarily made by men and women had an influence in this because they were the ones who are at home and they are the ones who knew what was ongoing. In de facto female-headed households and these are households where the women were either widowed they were separated, divorced or had never married. Essentially women only headed households. In Muranga and Arua women primarily made the decisions but there was an influence from other family members such as children and siblings of the woman or parents of the woman making the decision. And in Kuala and Ibanda we found that it is women who made these decisions only. So implications for our management and control. We find that it's in our vaccine uptake including RVF vaccine uptake is influenced by extrinsic and intrinsic factors. The extrinsic factors are cost of vaccine choice of vaccination points and having the requisite infrastructure for restraining animals for vaccination while the intrinsic factors are around access to information and decision making capacity of livestock vaccine uptake. So for veterinary departments when planning campaigns it is important to consider these barriers to enable them to make services that respond to farmer needs and to enhance our vaccine uptake. And although we acknowledge that the veterinary departments cannot be able to handle all intrinsic barriers we do acknowledge that there are continuous interactions with community members coupled with information sharing can increase trust and encourage uptake of vaccines for example of helping farmers to overcome barriers like vaccine hesitancy, mistrust of veterinary vaccines and mistrust of veterinary officer and fears around vaccine side effects. So for more on this study can access it from this paper it's an open access paper. So I wish to acknowledge the projects under which this work was done the respective funders for the project the research teams involved in this work as well as the people and the county governments of Baringo, Kuala and Muranga as well as the leadership in Ibanda and Arua districts in Uganda and the local teams and the communities. Thank you.