 wherever you are listening from. My name is Margaret Karembu. I work for ISA, Afri Center, which is one of the hosted institutions in Illry. My training is in environmental science, and my practice is science communication, which like my predecessors, Cathy, Helen and others, have said they came into areas that they are not trained for, but they have developed passion for, so let me say I have great passion for science communication. Let me also thank Illry and partners for this opportunity and the partnership we have had over the last more than two decades that Illry has hosted us at the beautiful Illry campus. So I'm going to take you through science communication as an enabler of one health culture and practice. And just to start us with, I noted from the participants that we have very few medics, pure medics or human medics. And so I thought of giving just one example to demonstrate what it is and what we mean by ensuring that we incorporate all of us. So I have this slide. It's a real life experience where I was with my daughter in a social function and sitting, we were sitting next to a politician. And when we're introducing ourselves, she's a dental surgeon and she mentioned that she does a lot of root canal. So the politician said, oh, you know, the doctor asked me to report next week for a root canal. Can you explain to me who does it entail? So my good dear daughter said, it was just three simple steps, three simple procedures. The first one is extirpation. The second one is chemo-mechanical preparation. And finally, we do optimization. So the politician was just left pissed and was wondering what all these terminologies were all about. But of course, to professionals in that field, that is really how you explain root canal among your peers. So looking at, this actually led to one of the Nobel Rates in the early 1925 Bernard Shaw to proclaim that the single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place. And indeed, what we have seen over time, the common practice has been that communication is almost usually an afterthought. We confuse science communication with corporate or public relations communications. There is this notion that one size fits it all. And so once you develop a communication plan, it should fit across sectors. And then as I review some of the publications that scientists and researchers work on, most of the times when they're asked about communication, how they'll communicate their findings, they say they will do a general publication good, but that does not go beyond your peers. Then of course, we need to differentiate between information and communication. And these two are not the same. So then what is science communication? So here we are, we have the scientists of the researcher and this applies to both social scientists and natural scientists. And then we have these big crowd here, which is made of the public. But remember, there is no audience like a public. And so when it comes to one health, we'll be confronted with engaging with these multitude of players or actors in the one health system. And all will require different approaches. And so we talk about science communication about putting research into context by helping stakeholders understand research results and make informed evidence-based decisions. So in a nutshell, science communication strengthens the connection between science and society or between research, researchers in society. It also helps build confidence about scientific information. And one key message about what science communication is all about and our role as researchers is that we have an obligation to communicate our work. It is not the job of others to do that. But then we have this big communication challenge comes to the one health. And just again to demonstrate why it is so important to put communication into context. There is this conference that happened a while back it was a UN conference and the moderator just asked what we thought was a very simple question. What is your opinion about food shortage in the rest of the world? And of course there were people from the Middle East, the Americas, the Europeans and the Africans. And one, the arabesque, what opinion means? The Americas asked, what the rest of the world mean? Then Europe asked, what shortage means? And then Africa, I'm sorry to use that. This was really, I could not edit it because it was a cartoon that was put out there. Yes, what does food mean? And we know for sure, this is the challenge that we have with the one health that we have diverse cultures and disciplines. We have from yesterday talked about the multidisciplinary, the transdisciplinary nature of one health, varied interests and needs, inability to simplify technical research findings. And we have a lot of jargon and acronyms. As I was listening from yesterday, I have a whole range of acronyms, AMR, we have toxicity, we have epidemiology, we have pathogens and all these have different meanings for different groups. And then of course we have the gender insensitivity in messaging, as Helen mentioned very clearly. And so we say context will determine how messages are received. So if you're not careful about or sensitive about this big gap of communication, then we are not likely to do communication at all. It would just be an illusion. So what are some of the key watchers that I wanted to share with you this evening? We have realized that there are three key gaps. Among many, there is the language gap when it comes to one health. There's the communication gap and then there's the silo mentality. My predecessors in this session have just re-emphasized about this silo mentality. Looking at the communication gap in the African wisdom, we always know that the words are responsible for cutting down a tree, the act is only an instrument. So what we need to do is to ensure we get the relevance of our communication. There is what we want to say and there is also what our audiences are interested in. And to do that, we need to develop our source skills training among the researchers and the OH partners, including risk communication and very, very importantly, storytelling about our work, about our audiences, about those who receive our interventions. And we need to increase social media and conventional media engagement to enhance OH visibility and also to influence policy because our policy makers will mainly get information about one health from the media. Also, if as researchers we are not there or as actors, then you get the wrong information. Now, one of the other big challenges about the silo mentality is about addressing the overlapping mandates between the different ministries, between the various disciplines. So we have the ministries of agriculture, health, we have finance, we have environment. And if we don't do that through the houses that make laws, like the parliamentary sessions, then we are not likely to get to overcome these overlapping mandates and so we'll not be able to close this communication gap. Then the other major challenge is the challenge of the language, the language gap. And this is really to do with what health scientists or technical experts and non-technical experts think or contextualize communications. For scientists, we start with technical theory, collecting data and then we come to the conclusion. But if you're going beyond your comfort zone to communicate with people who are not in your discipline, like you're going to do in one health, we need to be aware that most of the things non-technical people who are not in your area are interested in the bottom line. What is it that, what is the conclusion? How does this intervention align with the one health goals? Then of course you can go to the rest of the story, you can go to the background and so on, but you have only a few minutes to communicate that. So scientists, you start with the context, historical context, the public wants to know the bottom line of what we call the so-called. Then one of the golden rules is to really make sure that we simplify our language, we unpack or become conscious of the technical jargon and acronyms we use in our disciplines so that we can be able to reach out to people who are not within our main domain or our main area of operation. So we have this, sometimes scientists are accused, but even the social scientists, we also have jargon elasticity, we have recession. All these mean differently for the natural scientists. And then finally, my other app that we have seen is what we have delivered this afternoon and yesterday, that really we need to break this insulation or silo mentality. And this is because again, if you want to go fast with the implementation of one health, we need to really go together. And some of the proposed interventions among many, we need to do a lot of best code and net mapping, going beyond the code analysis to understand the relationships and connections of the actors so that our messages will be based on the kind of connections that the OH actors are having within an ecosystem. We also need to identify the key territorial issues so that again, we identify these shared values so that we are able to communicate better. Then increase engagement across OH sectors to address conflicts and appropriate platforms are so key. Because again, if you don't communicate using the appropriate platforms, then you'll not be able to reach out. So in conclusion, I would say that we need to understand relationships among OH actors for message context. That is the most important because if message is out of context, then even the interventions will not be taken up. Then we need to show integrity and shared values that align with the OH actors. Very, very importantly, we need to simplify language and jointly develop a one-health glossary of terminologies and acronyms. I'm not sure if the actors have already started doing this, but I did see a paper recently from the One Health European Union joint program where they have actually developed very concise glossary so that we get to understand and interpret the messages in a more harmonized way. Then we need to work with the media and policy makers right from the onset. Let us not wait until we have an intervention to bring the media. Let's work with them together. Let's build their capacity. Then we also need to be more proactive than reactive in order to build trust. For indeed, people want to know that you care before they care about what you know. And with that, I say, I'm looking forward to the discussion and just to getting to know how best we build healthy people, healthy environment and healthy animals through the One Health approach. Thank you. Thanks very much, Margaret, for that brief presentation. I know this presentation takes almost an hour and enormous circumstances, but you have done well to summarize it and to hammer the main points. On your behalf, let me just comment that the cartoon you used is basically for certain purposes is not the real situation. So we normally clarify that when you're using that cartoon so that people don't misinterpret. Let me say that on your behalf as chair. So thanks very much.