GARC’s January 2026 Featured Platform User: Optima-CVC, South Africa

 

We are excited to introduce you to this month’s Featured Platform User, Optima-CVC, South Africa. Optima-CVC is also a proud Recognized Center of Excellence.

As part of the South African Veterinary Association Community Veterinary Clinics (SAVA-CVC), Optima strives to educate communities in animal responsibility while also relieving welfare pressure by providing mass sterilization and vaccination campaigns. They work in rural and township areas across Gauteng, Limpopo, and the Eastern Cape provinces, focusing on low-income communities. To encourage community engagement from future professionals, they involve veterinary students alongside animal health technicians in their campaigns.

 

For the past 12 months, using the GARC Data Platform they have made the following impact:

Animal vaccinations: 61 149, of which 53 332 were dogs.

People educated: 3 835

 

 

We spoke to Dr Renee van Rheede van Oudtshoorn, Principal Veterinarian at Optima-CVC about how they use the GARC Data Platform and the benefits they have experienced since partnering with us.

 

Briefly explain what rabies-related work you do?

We are a non-profit organization that aims to provide primary animal healthcare services to lower income communities. Our rabies elimination work is funded by Battersea Dogs and Cats Home. This partnership allows us to strengthen our One Health approach to rabies prevention and elimination in the Eastern Cape, Gauteng, and Limpopo. We provide vaccination, education, awareness, outbreak investigation, training and capacity building opportunities in a public-private partnership with state veterinary services and human health officials.

 

How long have you used the GARC Data Platform? 

Two years.

 

 

What benefits have the GARC Data Tools provided you?

GARC allows us to generate live interactive evidence of how we achieve our project objectives. We capture our vaccinations, education and rabies case investigation activities at village level in the remote rural areas we work in. We have also benefited from integrating our vaccination data with education initiatives and rabies case investigation into a single map. We use the GARC visual dashboard to draft reports to our funders and the dashboard even does double duty as an advocacy tool with our state partners.

We are also a recognized Rabies Center of Excellence (RCE) and as an RCE, we have gained international recognition, increasing our exposure and credibility on both a local and global scale.

 

Which of the GARC Data Tools have been most beneficial to your work and why?

The Vaccination and Sterilization Tracker (VST) tool has been most beneficial because it allows us to not only track vaccinations but also capture detailed information for each animal and its owner. This tool allows us to be able to share reliable village-level data with our state partners. This event-based data also helps to direct our efforts to other primary animal healthcare interventions that our communities may need.

 

Social media details:

Instagram: @savacvcec

Facebook: Sava Cvc Eastern Cape

Website: https://www.savacvc.co.za/rabies/

Are you working towards rabies elimination? Do you want to benefit from improving your data collection process? Do you want to be able to visualize this data to engage with potential donors in a more meaningful way? Contact us to become part of our growing network of GARC Data Platform users – click here.

Alternatively, if you are already actively using our GARC Data Platform, send us an email to support@rabiesalliance.org and you could be our next featured user!

 

These activities were supported by Battersea Dogs and Cats Home.