Building capacity through access to resources

Implementing effective rabies prevention and control measures—whether at a national or local level—requires trained and experienced people from both the human and animal health sectors.  GARC builds capacity in these sectors by working through partnerships and networks to provide resources and training needed for effective rabies elimination programs. This contributes to our goal of bringing an end to deaths from canine rabies by 2030.

As part of GARC’s commitment to building in-country capacity to eliminate rabies, the Canine Rabies Blueprint and the GARC websites have recently been updated to improve access to up-to-date guidance and resources for the rabies control community.

The Canine Rabies Blueprint now has links to a large number of recently published resources and new technical papers. The section on optimising the design of dog vaccination programmes has been revised, and the Stepwise Approach towards Rabies Elimination (SARE) tool has been updated based on field experience and feedback. New case studies have been added to illustrate how regional networks and improved data reporting bulletins have benefited the development of national and regional control strategies.

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The relaunched GARC website now has a fresh new look, has been restructured to better reflect GARC’s core areas and to help visitors more easily access their areas of interest.  The resources section is a central access point to all of GARC’s resources, including the FAQs about rabies, technical guidance through the rabies blueprints, educational materials, community news stories and our online educational courses. The home page contains a navigation bar that quickly directs website visitors to the desired information.

Finally, there is an improved World Rabies Day section with a new system to help with the registration and promotion of events and an updated toolkit for event organisers. Once again, we are proud to offer the World Rabies Day Awards to recognise individuals and organizations that have made exceptional contributions to rabies control in their communities. We encourage you to register your planned WRD events and nominate your rabies champions for an award this year.

We hope you will find some time to explore both of these updated sites and let us know what you think.

Contributed by Louise Taylor and Deepashree Balaram of GARC who oversaw the updates. Many people contributed to the website updates, but we would especially like to thank Ryan Wallace, Ad Vos, Thomas Müller and Conrad Freuling for their help with the blueprint revisions and GARC’s webmaster Andy Hebrank who works his magic in all of our websites.