STOP Spillover Program Chooses DevResults

by Aasit Nanavati

DevResults is pleased to announce support to USAID’s STOP Spillover to build the program’s digital monitoring system.

In October 2020, USAID funded a five-year program to enhance the capacity of priority countries in Africa and Asia to reduce the risk of viral spillover from animal hosts to humans. Strategies to Prevent Spillover, or STOP Spillover, assists target countries to enhance country capacity to prevent and/or mitigate spillover of zoonotic viruses from animals to humans, and to reduce the amplification and spread of these viruses once they have spilled over to humans. Working with host governments and relevant stakeholders, STOP Spillover will strengthen local capacity to identify, assess, and monitor risk associated with emerging zoonotic viruses, as well as develop and introduce proven and novel risk reduction measures. STOP Spillover focuses on a number of prioritized zoonotic viruses including Ebola, Lassa, Marburg, Nipah, animal-origin coronaviruses (including SARS, MERS-CoV, and SARS-CoV-2), and zoonotic influenza viruses.

STOP Spillover is working in countries that are at high-risk for the emergence and re-emergence of known zoonotic viruses with pandemic potential, starting with five countries in the project’s first year: Bangladesh, Cambodia, Liberia, Uganda, and Viet Nam.

The project includes three integrated and complementary objectives:

  • Objective 1: Strengthen country capacity to monitor, analyze and characterize the risk of priority emerging zoonotic viruses
  • Objective 2: Strengthen country capacity to develop, validate, and implement interventions to reduce risk of priority emerging zoonotic viruses spilling over from animals to people
  • Objective 3: Strengthen country capacity to mitigate amplification and spread of priority zoonotic disease in human populations

STOP Spillover needed a digital platform to collect, store, organize and present the information necessary to manage its operations and performance. The project was looking for a company that would commit to modifying and maintaining the system as additional country programs and core activities are launched. And that's where DevResults came in.

DevResults — a technology company that supports organizations working in the international development and humanitarian assistance fields — was selected through a competitive process.

The STOP Spillover project mission and objectives include a heavy focus on collecting, analyzing, and monitoring the risk associated with zoonotic disease spillover, and DevResults has a proven track record that will help STOP Spillover meet its objectives. The system build is still currently in the setup and configuration phase and we look forward to formally launching the live DevResults STOP Spillover site in the coming months.

A series of blog posts will be periodically posted as important lessons are captured on the building, maintaining, and managing of the system. These blog posts will be published for open access and will detail different perspectives on the technical work, check in on the progress, and describe steps that are upcoming. So stay tuned for more!