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Capacity Building

Emerging local and global challenges, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the COVID-19 pandemic
emphasize the importance of implementing a One Health framework to work towards global health security, and to successfully manage complex health challenges and disease outbreaks that the world faces today.

There are many reasons why we should invest in One Health. One Health offers an effective and efficient approach to dealing with pandemics. One Health also offers an approach to dealing with human and animal diseases such as human rabies. For example, human rabies eradication efforts will not succeed if rabies is not also addressed in animal populations (World Bank Group, 2018). The economic benefit of investing in One Health is powerful.

Multiple hands, each a different ethnicity, connecting puzzle pieces together

Implementing a successful One Health framework will require a large-scale multidisciplinary network of health professionals who are able to work effectively within their own sector, as well as across sectors and disciplines. It will also require communication, coordination, collaboration, and knowledge of One Health core competencies.

Barriers to implementing a successful One Health framework in countries include fragmented governance of
human health, animal health, and the environment; lack of education and training in the One Health approach; and sectors that are siloed and do not have a history of working together.

The US-Middle East One Health Network (UMOHN) intends to remove these barriers through capacity building. The US-Middle East One Health Network will deliver capacity building activities such as One Health core competency framework development, training and education, human resource development, implementation framework development, multi sector collaboration, and policy formulation to prepare countries for successful One Health implementation. It is our hope that capacity building in these areas will set Middle Eastern countries up for success when implementing the One Health framework.

One Health Core Competencies

The Core Competencies are the foundation of the One Health approach, which is why UMOHN is focusing on capacity building in this area. The One Health core competencies outline the skills and behaviors necessary for successful performance within the One Health workforce. The One Health core competencies identified during the Rome Synthesis in 2012 are management, communication and informatics, values and ethics, leadership, team and collaboration, roles and responsibilities, and systems thinking (Togami et al., 2018).