Addressing the challenge of Antimicrobial Resistance in Cameroon: University leadership in capacity building at in-service and pre-service levels, from a One Health perspective.

Antimicrobial drug resistance constitutes a major enduring challenge which has drastically limited the efforts of various stakeholders in the Public Health system in Cameroon as in other sub-Saharan countries. The threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is growing at an alarming rate and the situation is perhaps aggravated in developing countries due to gross abuse in the use of antimicrobials. In Cameroon, All the indicators of this item had remained the lowestfor the Antimicrobial (AMR) GHSA package. To respond to the global public Health threat posed by AMR, AFROHUN (then OHCEA) Cameroon prioritized capacity building, focusing primarily on professionals.
In a four-step process, an in-service manual was developed and tested for a multi-sectoral audience including all the pillars of One Health. A situational analysis took place in 2017, with a field Knowledge Attitude Practice (KAP) investigation, targeting human health professionals, animal health actors, agronomist and environmental health professionals and decision markers. This ground investigation informed the curriculum development process, by identifying gaps and training needs, for an in-sevice training program available in both English and French in 2018. This training curriculum covers a total period of six months, and run discontinuously, alternating three indoor workshop and two field practicums.
A total of 21 professionals benefited from the pilot training in 2019. have been selected and three workshops have been conducted to test and improve the manual. Government (central and local levels). The manual elaborated is a contribution towards Improvement on GHSA indicators of AMR, better health, facilitate government efforts to fight AMR. The training designed attracted a strong adhesion and appropriation by the Cameroon government, notably MINEPIA through its PRODEL program, and received a Substantial support from development partners (Tufts University brought in additional support for field implementation activities by trainees).
Inspired and encouraged by this success story, a Postgraduate diploma was developed as the fifth step in this process, alongside a Master program which has just been assessed and adopted by the University of Buea Academic Planning Committee, to be implemented in the up-coming academic year, obviously extended to other countries of the sub-region and the continent. Lessons learned from this journey are unique, as clearly highly the importance of “outreach” pillar of university system, which might equally foster the two other main pillars, which are “Teaching & related duties” and “Research”.