Promoting stakeholder awareness, collaboration, and engagement in One Health surveillance with a serious game

The COVID-19 pandemic and recurrent Mpox and Ebola virus epidemics have revealed a critical need for One Health disease surveillance systems, and especially systems with integrated community-based approaches for early disease detection. Local stakeholders, including community workers in the human, animal, and environmental health sectors, are at the forefront of emerging disease detection and early warnings. However, their involvement in surveillance systems remains limited, even though they play a critical role in event- and community-based surveillance and responses. We developed a collaborative board game, called ALERT, to strengthen stakeholder engagement across all levels of One Health surveillance systems in West and Central Africa. This serious game has generated significant enthusiasm among the 500 people who have tested it in over 100 countries.