The SARE is important for several reasons. Firstly, the SARE helps to assess the current rabies situation and the progress of any rabies control programs currently being implemented in your country. This helps to identify shortcomings and highlight successes that you have achieved.

In addition, the SARE helps to align your country’s Rabies Elimination Programme with the Global Strategic Plan (GSP). This also helps to create a standardised (yet customised for every country) approach that facilitates the development of regional strategic plans for rabies elimination.

Yes. The SARE has been designed to help make a clear and well thought out National Strategic Plan (NSP) as easy as possible. It helps identify activities that need to be included into the NSP so that you can achieve dog rabies elimination.

In addition, the SARE assists with the development of a workplan that outlines how you plan on implementing the NSP. 

Yes. The SARE has been designed to help both with creating National Strategic Plans (NSPs), as well as with revising and supplementing any existing NSPs. As rabies elimination programmes progress, workplans that accompany the NSPs will need to be revised to ensure that the targets and planned activities remain clear, and this is where the SARE is helpful.

The SARE has been designed to do exactly this. By using the SARE and developing your Nationals Strategic Plan (NSP) based on the SARE, you will align your country’s rabies elimination programme with that of the Global Strategic Plan (GSP).

The SARE generates clear outputs, including “accomplished” and “pending” activities. The accomplished activities highlight the successes of your rabies elimination programme. You can show these successes to political leaders and stakeholders to advocate for more support and funding to the country’s rabies elimination programme.

Yes. The Global Dog Rabies Elimination Pathway (GDREP) is a tool that has been designed to help develop a costing estimate for your rabies elimination workplan. This tool is complementary to the SARE and is ideally used to obtain a good estimate of the funds required. This will help you to advocate for an accurate funding approach, broken down into stages, to obtain funding for your rabies National Strategic Plan and workplan.

Ideally, a SARE would be undertaken every two (2) years. However, this is not a set timeframe and it is dependent on the progress made. The SARE can be undertaken at any time. Remember though, if you have made progress, you can only clearly demonstrate this by undertaking another SARE – you will then be able to mark previously “pending” activities as complete and hopefully see a change in your SARE score.

The SARE helps to standardise rabies elimination programmes, ensuring that they are robust and aligned with the Global Strategic Plan. By standardising programmes, it is then possible to identify common areas of interest in multiple different countries in a region. A regional plan can then be developed based on these common areas of interest for the region.

The SARE score gives a general indication of the progress that a country has made towards reaching freedom from dog rabies. Below are the explanations as to the situation a country is likely in based on their SARE score. 

Stage 0: A SARE score of 0 out of 5 signifies that basic information on the epidemiology of the disease is being compiled and that rabies is recognized as an endemic disease

Stage 1: Signifies a country where small-scale rabies control programs are being planned and developed

Stage 2: Signifies a country where a national rabies control strategy has been drafted and is being implemented

Stage 3: Signifies a country where the national rabies control programme is resulting in a decline in both human and animal rabies cases. 

Stage 4: Signifies that dog-mediated human rabies free zones have been declared in many regions of the country.

Stage 5: Signifies that a country that has self-declared freedom from dog-mediated rabies.

Yes. Although the SARE was developed to help National rabies elimination programmes, it can be used at the sub-national level. This is especially important in larger countries or countries using a federal system where individual provinces/regions would each need to undertake the SARE.

Yes. As is the case with most GARC tools, the SARE is entirely free to use. We do ask that you please share your results with us so that we can assess where GARC and its partners may be able to assist your rabies elimination efforts best.

Yes. The SARE can be used by anyone. However, we encourage that anyone interested in using the SARE collaborate with representatives of their national government. This is to ensure that any additional programmes are sustainable and aligned with the governments needs. As described in the Global Strategic Plan, rabies elimination efforts must be government centric.