Stronger Together: Collaboration leads to impact in South Africa

In his review of 2025, Dr Andre Coetzer mentions the many highlights that we experienced here at GARC. One of these highlights is how the Stronger Together Grant showed the power of collaboration when it comes to driving community-wide rabies elimination efforts. Two of our Rabies Centers of Excellence (RCEs) in the Limpopo province of South Africa, Hoedspruit Animal Outreach (HALO) and Animal Relief for Rural Communities (ARRC), combined their efforts and made a meaningful, measurable impact across ten communities between September 2024 and March 2025.

Together, these two RCEs successfully vaccinated 2038 dogs, and in doing so helped to protect both animals and people from the threat of rabies. For this collaborative outreach, the two organizations combined forces. HALO reached 1 299 dogs through a combination of stationary vaccination points and extensive door-to-door outreach, while ARRC contributed 739 vaccinations across its focus areas. Here at GARC, we could not have expected these results, especially when we consider the challenges that these RCEs face: from unpredictable summer rains to needing to gain the trust of local communities, while many of these remote locations are really hard to reach.

GARC’s Stronger Together Grant did more than enable dogs to be vaccinated in the communities. Although this is a key component of rabies elimination, we also believe that knowledge empowers communities. The Grant enabled HALO and ARRC to strengthen their rabies awareness and community engagement efforts. HALO distributed 1 300 vaccination leaflets and conducted three-day rabies education sessions for children, combining GARC’s Want a Friend, Be a Friend with their own custom resources. ARRC further expanded the educational reach by sharing materials with 130 learners.

Crucially, the Stronger Together Grant enabled the two organizations to learn from each other and strengthen their own knowledge and skills. HALO and ARRC reported the following as the benefits of receiving the Stronger Together Grant:

“The main benefit was to gain valuable insight in each other’s operations and learn from each other. Also, by joining each other’s outreach we were able to work faster on the outreach days thanks to added manpower.”

While logistical constraints like both teams conducting Saturday outreaches, as well as the costs associated with travel, limited the frequency of joint fieldwork, the experience reinforced a clear lesson: Collaboration leads to impact.

GARC’s Stronger Together Grant deepened the spirit of cooperation between two committed RCEs. HALO and ARRC have expressed a strong desire to collaborate more widely in the future, confident that by working together, they can:

• protect more communities,
• save more lives, and
• help to get one step closer to a world free from dog-mediated rabies.

Do you want to know more about becoming a Rabies Center of Excellence and the benefits thereof? Contact us at support@rabiesalliance.org.

The Communities Against Rabies initiative is supported by Battersea Dogs and Cats Home.