Improving Village Animal Health Worker participation in national disease surveillance systems: A case study from Cambodia

Para‐veterinary systems have arisen in numerous developing countries to address the low capacity of national veterinary services in meeting livestock health demands of mainly smallholder farmers. In Cambodia, the village animal health worker (VAHW) system was established in the early 1990s, involving short training programmes to equip VAHWs to provide basic animal health services for smallholder farmers, particularly the vaccination of cattle for haemorrhagic septicaemia (HS). However, there are increasing expectations that VAHWs provide village level disease surveillance information to the national veterinary services, despite their low‐level disease diagnostic skills. To identify opportunities to improve the disease reporting system in Cambodia, a closed‐ended cross‐sectional study of VAHWs (n = 80) from two provinces was conducted in 2015, examining their contact frequency with district and provincial animal health authorities. Ordinal logistic regression was used to determine factors associated with increased frequency of VAHW contact with the district animal health authorities responsible for national disease reporting. Positive associations between income generated from VAHW activities (p = .01) and the frequency of visiting farmers (p