 is appropriate in the one health context. Animal scientists, wildlife, and rangeland ecologists that went into the veterinary side from there and entered the one health domain about 12, 13 years ago, 14 years ago. And I want to talk to you about rangeland health within one health, but also specifically the herding health example that I would love to introduce to you briefly and then some key considerations I think from a rangeland and one health perspective. So I founded with colleagues a company called Herding for Hope. And what we do is we specialize in supporting entities and communities wanting to implement the herding health model, which is really a one health rangeland improvement and livestock pastoralism improvement system. So I'll explain the Herding for Health model to you, which has been going for close to 10 years now in the region. And it's being implemented in multiple countries, about eight countries already throughout southern and eastern Africa. And briefly starting, I would like to just quickly introduce the definition of what is rangelands. Often we associate it with specific things in the African context. It's defined as a spatially defined ecosystem that are dominated by grasses, grass-like plants combined with various degrees of bush and tree cover that predominantly grazed or browsed. So that's the land user grazing, mainly wild and domestic animals, and also used as natural and semi-red natural ecosystem. So I myself am a farmer as well. And just to prove the point from a pastoralism perspective, this is our family farm. And my father, from whom I've learned most things about rangelands, teaching my son there at the bottom, is that if you want to be a livestock farmer, you first have to become a grass farmer. And this picture was taken after five years of severe drought and the first bit of rain we got, the rangeland was able to balance right back. And that is the resilience of what we have in well and intact rangeland systems. On the continent, rangeland comprises the majority of our space. Africa is inherently a rangeland continent, which is partly why I love it so much. And it covers an estimated 62% of the continent and 77% of the agricultural land. A lot of people depend on the rangeland systems because they exist within rangeland systems. However, degradation is threatening it at a alarming rate. And therefore, for those that were at the First One Health International Conference in Melbourne, Australia, it's about to the date 13 years ago, February 2011. I don't know who was there. Alex, few of us, are we giving our ages away? Not really, very few of us. And I will never forget, in the plenary session, a lot of the focus was on one medicine. And we need to remember the difference between one health and one medicine and the evolution of one health, as we understand it. In the plenary session, a colleague from Africa stood up and said, in Africa, food security is a one health problem and not just neglected zoonosis. And I so valued that. And the reality is that if our rangeland systems in Africa starts collapsing, we will have major challenges in terms of our food security, which is unfortunately part of what we're seeing happening. So we love this picture as a representation of what we think of an African rangeland. Intact grasslands, enough water, wildlife, mega herbivores, some of the largest numbers in the world occurring here, coexisting with agro-parseralists. In the background, there are communities there with their crop fields, protecting it from the mega. It's how people have coexisted, like our chiefs have said, for many years. And often, despite the complexity that happens here, the life here is quite simple in a day-to-day basis. But we need to understand the complexity that represents a picture like this in the rangeland system. There are so many interfaces there, so many different land users and policies that we need to consider. The reality is much of our rangelands are starting to look like this. This is a photo I took a few years back in the Chulus landscape in Kenya. And the story about this is that the headman living to the right of this picture used to get lost in this wetland when he was a boy looking for his father's cattle. He can still recall that day. And now it's a wasteland, and he is concerned, deeply, deeply concerned, because how can you think and talk about health of a community and prosperity if the very land that in which you live is looking like this? There's zero ecosystem services that can come from this land. And it's not just there. The scale at which this is happening is massive. This was taken yesterday morning, 10 kilometers from here in Ward 14 of the Wangi district, where we also involved. And I've walked with my colleague three, four kilometers trying to find grass yesterday morning, and we couldn't. And these tracks are actually going towards the Wangi National Park. And the reason why it's so trampled is because this village is on the edge of the park. All the neighboring communities are passing through this village with their cattle, sometimes at 12 or one o'clock in the day, they're only arriving at the village to try and get two hours of grazing inside the national park. And this is February, which is supposed to be peak rainy season, the luscious. So in other words, our rangeland is collapsing in the sense and it's completely lacking the ability to hold water and provides a sustenance of any kind. So whereas livestock is the driver in this particular instance, we also believe in rangeland systems that livestock can be part of the solution to turn such a scenario around if actually managed appropriately. And that's what I would love to talk to you about. The reality in our rangelands in Africa, if we look at all of this, are summarized in what we have found in multiple countries and communities, comes down to actually the age hold concept and practice of proper herding. And today I'm gonna talk to you about herding as a One Health topic. And what we found across the region is that we have devolved to a position of unskilled and uncoordinated herding in most of our communities in the region. And at most, we find what is called, but we've termed drop and fetch herding for those that are not full-time herding. And then in many areas, we find completely zero herding at all. That livestock are just left to tend to themselves and they make the decisions as to where they're gonna graze when. Linked with that is that herding is at an individual level. There is no collective action in many of our communities as to deciding and planning their resources. What are the consequences and what are the opportunities? It's not just consequences that are negative, but also opportunities that sits within this to turn it around. The consequences on a negative side has multiple health outcomes. And that's what I wanted to show you. And I don't have time to go through all of this, but if you look at the direct impacts, most of what we require, most of our governmental departments even, that needs to work towards solving animal health and solving disease control and solving human-wild life conflict and solving the range of degradation actually is a result of poor herding practices. Meaning that there's a potential single solution to all the combined efforts of so many silo-based departmental approaches. And the consequences of these just as much indirect in the sociological, sociopolitical system of a landscape and household level with multiple negative health outcomes. So we found this challenge in our communal farming systems and what we recognize is that the problems are definitely complex, they're dynamic and multidimensional, yet very important, which I think is one of the aspects that we probably forget most in one health is that the solution must be simple, practical and traditionally acceptable. Otherwise we busy with a bunch of theoretical warawara in a lot of conferences instead of actually talking a language that people on the ground who are the real one health practitioners understand and that is inherently practical. So how do we do that? And we realized the focus should be on strategic herding and crawling in the form of skilled herders. That was the foundational principles for the herding health model and which is a one health model. We believe one of few really strong examples of one health in practice in the African continent that is a one health model to empower communities and stakeholders to address the suite of challenges faced at the wildlife, livestock, community conservation interface in a practically traditionally acceptable way that offers impact and sustainability in the face of climate change, wildlife, livestock conflict, skills and job shortages, poverty and transboundary animal diseases. And you may think this is, well, okay, you just wanna solve all these wicked problems and in fact, if you really go down to it, if it's truly a bottom up approach as opposed to a top down, it's possible. And often we limit ourselves by trying to tackle these problems with a top down but actually if you tackle it from a bottom up from a community level, it's very solvable and that's what we do. So we like this representation where to me the original three spheres, if I may quickly point, that's one minute extra. So the three spheres of one health is confusing in practice but where it came from in the evolution of one health was to make sure that people understand that one is not more important than the other but it's not a practical representation. You get what I'm saying. So because the human health and animal health cannot be outside of the environment in which it exists. So in a practical sense, human health, livestock health, wildlife health comes, functions within the rangeland system in which it occurs and that starts making it much more reality. It creates a context that really is needed for one health. So what is the Heading for Health model? I only have time for the conceptual model, not the scientific model behind it and the conceptual model I'm not gonna go into detail. We do week long trainings on this. It's a process that is designed to facilitate communities to empower them to actually be the solution themselves that we embarked on and one of the big attributions to this was actually involving engineers in helping to think through what truly systems approaches are because inherently many of us are biologists and systems thinking sometimes is lacking. So a multi-disciplinary team, it's a one health framework to say, listen, if we want health outcomes in any one of those four pillars, rangelands, animal, wild and domestic, people, livelihoods and governance, those four, you need to work in all four of those to have a wild health effect in any one of those or in all four of those. And in order to do that, you have that enables the action cycle, which are the four Hs. Hope, Heal and Harvest. People do not do what they don't believe in and what they don't have hopeful. We start with hope. Hope is the substance at the very beginning of any person's movement. You do, if you are hopeless, you sit. If you are hopeful, you do. So we start there and without faith in something that it will bring you where you need to be, you won't do anything. We start with hope. With our communities, then we heard, skilled, hurting, crawling. It starts healing and it starts producing a harvest and it's a cycle and out of that process it has impacts and out of that impacts it starts having landscape resilience through the four returns which we claim is forever but it's mainly saying that it's generational. We are absolutely against project-based approaches. We believe it's one of the biggest threats to our rangeland systems are project-based approaches and we have to start being honest about it and come up with much better solutions which we believe are processes and not projects. Skilled herders, they are the change agents for our African rangelands, we believe. They're the guys on the ground, the ladies on the ground, more and more ladies are joining, becoming skilled herders and they are empowered to enable best practices in communal livestock and rangeland systems. We have multiple levels of training now already and career-parting, why? Because we need to change the view of herders. Herding was around which the continent started and it's the age-old practice and we've broken it down and we're paying for it and we believe it's time for a new generation of herders. They should be the most important positions in a community and that's what we're trying to do and communities are starting to embrace that thought. These are eight competency skills, it's multidisciplinary, so is the MNE linked to it, must be multidisciplinary. I'm not gonna go through all of those. We use technology, all our technologies that we use is inherently mobile. We are trapped in a sedentary way of thinking in so many ways and actually the solutions for Africa is mobile. Mobility is our adaptation tool. So all our solutions are inherently mobile. Mobile crawls are used to access grazing, to regenerate the rangelands, to fertilize crop fields and the communities and the farming committees and the herders manages these systems. They collect seed themselves, they sow it back into degraded rangeland and our land starts to regenerate where there's been nothing. Our soil health colleague just explains without any organic material, your soil is sterile. It's only minerals. We put it back with regenerative farming practices. We even have, our herders have managed the first mobile quarantine system for food and mouth disease control in Botswana as in a pilot with the government. They are health practitioners, risk mitigators if we are willing to empower them. And this should not look like this. I'm sorry, this is my conclusion, but I'm gonna quickly try and defrag what we see. So number one, systems thinking. Absolutely important. Many of us aren't systems thinking practitioners. We need to work across disciplines to enable, bottom up solutions driven collaboration at the local context. Government and scientific compartmentalism is one of our biggest challenges. In fact, we believe our farmers are the best one health practitioners. We all doing conferences to try and learn what it is. They're really doing it. They know what it is. We cannot tell them anything about one health. We trying to figuring it out. Who are positioned to be one health practitioners and who are positioned to be one health enablers? We should be not practitioners, but enablers. Our people on the ground are the one health practitioners and we should enable them to make it possible. The multiplier effect one plus one is greater than two. It's an absolutely important one for the economics of one health. And we prove that through our system by whatever way of funding comes through human wildlife conflict, range land restoration or livestock production health. If it comes in, the system has the same outcomes to all the spheres. In that way, the cost of enabling one health becomes so much cheaper if we work together in that way. And I would love to explain to you in more detail. New generation of skilled herders is what we need to enable and we believe in simplistic complexity. If it's complex, it doesn't have to be complicated. Range land restoration starts with the restoration of people's hearts. It's where it starts. Everything starts here. If you love what you do, if you believe in what you do, it will lead into the actions that requires. And land stewardship is inspired and enabled and empowered. It's not demanded nor incentivized. Those are some food for thought from our perspective. And thank you very much for listening.