Short Abstract

This session explores One Health as an African prism for understanding human, animal, and environmental interdependence. It foregrounds African epistemologies and examines how local knowledge, social relations, and lived realities reshape African One Health discourse.

Long Abstract

In recent years, One Health has gained prominence as a framework for understanding the interconnections between human, animal, and environmental health across sub-Saharan Africa. Although institutionalized largely through global health and biomedical agendas originating in the Global North, many of the relationships that One Health seeks to capture are deeply embedded in African social worlds, livelihoods, knowledge systems, and understandings of the relationships between humans, non-human animals, and their environments.

This session approaches One Health as an African prism through which broader processes of social change can be examined. From migration and changing livelihoods to rural-urban transformations, environmental change, and experiences of zoonotic disease outbreaks, One Health offers a shared language for examining how relationships among people, animals, institutions, and environments are understood, negotiated, and transformed.

Drawing on work from across the continent, the session explores One Health as a relational and socially situated framework. It foregrounds diverse African epistemologies of human-animal-environment interdependence while critically examining how these forms of knowledge intersect with, reshape, or challenge global One Health discourse and practice. In doing so, the session invites participants to consider One Health as a site for examining knowledge, power, social relations, and changing African realities.

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