The University of Edinburgh has announced a £5.5 million ($7.13 million) grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in support of efforts to improve the health and productivity of farm animals in sub-Saharan Africa.

Designed to boost the livelihoods of livestock farmers through evidence-based technologies, the Supporting Evidence-Based Interventions (SEBI) initiative comprises three programs. The first will identify interventions that reduce death rates and reproductive losses in dairy cattle in Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Tanzania and award sub-grants to research groups investigating the causes of those losses. The first of the grants under the program was awarded to the University of Glasgow to build a disease surveillance platform in Tanzania.

A second program will facilitate data collection and development of analytical tools to better track livestock performance. To that end, researchers are setting up the Livestock Data for Decisions (LD4D) community, an international network of practitioners that will work to standardize data management systems across borders. And a third program will fund research on innovative veterinary interventions for use in developing countries. Through the program, SEBI already has awarded £125,000 ($162,218) to the University of Guelph to fund field trials of a hand-held device that enables dairy farmers to rapidly diagnose specific diseases in cows from a small volume of blood or milk.

"SEBI is a pilot project," said project lead Andy Peters, visiting professor at the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies. "But we anticipate that, if we are successful, it will expand to become the 'go to' organization for the evaluation of novel veterinary technologies and livestock improvement interventions in Africa."