SCARIA

Rodents are involved in 400 million zoonotic infections annually, and for massive crop and stocks destructions, thus representing a major threat to both health and food security. Progress has been made in rural tropical areas, especially through the test, optimization and appropriation by farmers of Ecologically Based Rodent Management (EBRM). It relies on a good knowledge of pest rodent biology and community-based sustainable modifications of the environment in order to decrease rodent population. However, large gaps of knowledge remain about urban rodents that are abundant and highly deleterious to millions of city inhabitants, especially in poor and rapidly expanding urban settings. Accordingly, recent scientific studies and WHO experts' syntheses all point towards an urgent need for interventional research on rodent-associated issues in cities, especially in developing countries. SCARIA is a sustainability science project that explicitly aims at addressing such a challenge by walking pathways to sustainable, community-based mitigation of rodent impacts in four African slums (Benin, Ethiopia, Niger and Madagascar). To do so, a panel of academics, public services, social enterprises, local NGOs, associations and representatives will pursue two main objectives: (1) to build and animate multi-stakeholder local working groups in four urban living labs who will rely on both scientific and local knowledge to discuss and formalize an urban EBRM adapted to each local socio-economic, cultural and environmental context; (2) to produce baseline data (cartography; rodent diversity, mobility and spatial distribution; zoonotic pathogens in rodents and humans; socio-economic impacts of rodents; project perception by the inhabitants) in all four pilot sites to provide socio-environmental proxies for future urban EBRM implementation and evaluation. As such, SCARIA will be the first initiative to focus specifically on urban EBRM in Africa, thus opening the gate to a new community of practice.