Fatmata Bangura worked as a clerk in the Director of Livestock and Veterinary Services office at the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry in 2018. Her daily duties included filing and delivering files from the Director's office. She held this position for seven years, from 2012 to 2019. ‘’I was happily working as a clerk at the livestock division because I love animals, and it was always my dream to work in places dealing with livestock, but I always wanted to do more,” Fatmata said.
Fatmata Bangura worked as a clerk in the Director of Livestock and Veterinary Services office at the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry in 2018. Her daily duties included filing and delivering files from the Director's office. She held this position for seven years, from 2012 to 2019. ‘’I was happily working as a clerk at the livestock division because I love animals, and it was always my dream to work in places dealing with livestock, but I always wanted to do more,” Fatmata said.
When FAO supported the Government of Sierra Leone in establishing an Epidemiology Unit at the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry in 2019, Fatmata joined the unit as a data entry clerk because of her computer skills.
“When I joined the epidemiology unit, I even felt happier because I was directly working on surveillance data of animal diseases,” Fatmata narrated.
An educational journey
After benefiting from various in-service trainings provided by FAO on surveillance, data analysis, Geographical Information System (GIS), and Event Mobile Application (EMA-i), Fatmata was determined to become a veterinarian. “The passion I have for animals and the skills and knowledge I had so far gained at the epidemiology unit made me feel that I could more impactful if became a veterinarian,” Fatmata adds. “Furthermore, the FAO Animal International Animal Health Advisor at the epidemiology unit was my real model because of her wealth of knowledge and her determination to help us all learn.” The challenge, there was no veterinary school in Sierra Leone. She settled on studying public health.
In 2020, she enrolled in a four-month field epidemiology training programme (FETP), funded by the United States Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC/ AFENET), where she obtained a frontline basic certificate in FETP. This was followed by a two-year training in the "Structured Operational Research and Antimicrobial Resistance Training Initiative" (SORT-IT), funded by the World Health Organization (WHO), where she got another certificate. She completed a nine-month field epidemiology training during the same period and obtained an intermediate FETP certificate in August 2022. She is now pursuing a master’s degree in Public Health (weekend programme) at the University of Makeni. Her research is on assessing risk factors associated with brucellosis occurrence in domestic animals in Sierra Leone.
New skills, new roles, new capacity
Veterinary services in Sierra Leone have long relied on rudimentary disease reporting procedures. However, FAO has been building capacity and promoting the use of GIS to access and use relevant information available in existing surveillance systems for priority zoonoses.
Today, Fatmata is responsible for GIS mapping in the Livestock and Veterinary Services at the Ministry of Agriculture. "Now, I can better monitor animal population variations and their movements in value chain studies for efficient and sustainable disease surveillance and control," Fatmata affirms.
FAO is engaged, through its Emergency Centre for Transboundary Animal Diseases (ECTAD), to support Sierra Leone in developing its own early warning systems through a capacity building on data visualisation and disease and risk factor mapping using GIS since early 2019. FAO also rolled out the In-Service Applied Veterinary Epidemiology Training (ISAVET) programme at the country level, with the first cohort of 12 trainees (five women and seven men) completing the four-month training in September 2022. The Organization also refurbished and equipped the Central Veterinary Laboratory, capacitating in-service students to acquire diagnostic skills to confirm priority transboundary and zoonotic diseases.
"Our veterinary services can now explain the dynamics and patterns of disease emergence or spread and increase the speed for an efficient response to a disease emergency," Fatmata adds.
Championing veterinary education
FAO is now working with the government and academic partners to make the veterinary school that the country urgently needs a reality. Facilities at Njala University, Moyamba district, in the Southern Province bordering the Atlantic Ocean in the west, and a curriculum are currently being assessed by the Tertiary Education Commission and Ministry of Tertiary and Higher Education before accreditation, with FAO providing technical and financial support.
FAO is firmly committed to providing infrastructure improvements and computer equipment to the University of Njala, to ensure that its Veterinary School will begin training the country's first batch of homegrown veterinarians in 2022, for which Fatmata and her determination will be a model.
