EXTENSION OF THE PAN-AFRICAN PROGRAMME FOR THE CONTROL OF EPIZOOTICS (PACE)

The Mid-Term review (MTR) of the PACE programme;conducted in October 2002. concluded that: the agreed completion date. October 2004, is no longer realistic and needs to be extended if any results are to be achieved." In response to this conclusion, the seventh biannual meeting of the programme's Advisory Committee recommended that: "... a consultant be appointed as soon as possible to review the recommendations of the MTR report in the light of the comments made by the PACE Coordination Unit (PCU), to design a possible extension of the PP"(PACE Programme). This Mission is the result of that teNiew and that recommendation. The Mission comprised two consultants: an Agricultural Economist, Mr Ian Talks, and a Veterinary Surgeon, Dr Guy Freeland. Dr Freeland was briefed by the EC in Brussels and the OIE in Paris on 24th 2003 and commenced work in Nairobi on 26thNovember 2003. Mr Talks joined the mission in Nairobi on December 2003. The time schedule for the Mission reports involved presentation of a draft Aide-Memoire to an in-house workshop on 17thDecember 2003, and submission of a final Aide-Memoire before departure on 21' December 2003. The consultants then wrote a draft report and returned to Nairobi to present it, on 9th January 2004, to a larger workshop to which external stakeholders were also invited and, heeding the comments made by the participants, submitted this Final Report on I4thJanuary 2004. Reports on these two workshops are attached as Annex 6. Although designed to consolidate and build upon the Veterinary Service Strengthening initiatives set up under the PARC programme. PACE differs from PARC in one major aspect: it was designed as a regional programme, managed by AU-IBAR, with thirty-two participating countries, whereas PARC was designed as 26 country programmes harmonized in their complementary activities by a regional component in the IBAR office. Well intentioned though this change in design was, with its desire to establish IBAR as the Centre of Excellence and co-ordinating authority for regional or continental issues of livestock production, health, and trade, it has proved administratively too cumbersome and has occasioned much (but certainly not all) of the delay that the various country projects have experienced. The technical and institutional strengthening projects to be implemented at national level were to be advised, guided and supported by bodies of technical expertise housed in seven Common Service Units (CSU) housed in the IBAR HQ in Nairobi arid its Regional Office in Bamako, Mali. These CSUs and the PCU were to he funded from the regional component of the PACE budget. At the briefing in Brussels, Dr Freeland was advised that the EC was essentially sympathetic to the recommendation for a two-year extension, but that it would have to be alThrded with a very limited extra budget (7% of the original budget). He was informed that it would probably be possible to find an extra EUR 5 million to cover the costs of the extension of the regional components of the programme, but that the costs of extension of the country projects should be afforded from within the original budget allocated to them against the global work plans they had proposed. If necessary. the Financing Agreement's `withdrawing rights' could be used to remove money allocated to the projects of one country in order to supplement the resources of another. In the time frame available, it was not possible for the consultants to meet representatives of more than a handful of the participating Countries, so they concentrated their efforts on interviews with the members of the Progranune Co-ordination Unit (PCU) and various experts (African and expatriate) employed in each of the Common Service Units in Nairobi, as well as visiting the West Africa Regional Co-ordination Unit (RCU) in Bamako, and the Headquarters of the African Union in Addis Ababa. It was clear from the outset that, if a two-year extension was to be proposed, it would necessitate a considerable pruning of the current operational resources and a narrower focusing of activities, outputs, and anticipated results. The mission therefore closely examined other options, including the possibility of a full strength extension but for only one year, and the zero option of no extension at all.