On July 2, 2024, a one-day expert elicitation workshop was conducted at ILRI-Addis, Ethiopia. 12 of the 14 invited experts from different parts of Ethiopia participated in the workshop with experts from charities such as Brooke, DST, and SPANA who work on working equids’ welfare and health, as well as veterinarians.

The workshop was facilitated by Wudu Temesgen, Gemma Charters, and Girma Asteraye which consisted of morning and afternoon sessions. The workshop began with a welcome and opening remarks from Jonathan Rushton (GBADs director) and Theodore Knight Jones (GBADs Ethiopian case team lead).

In the morning session, a brief overview of GBADs and the working equids study was presented to the participants, followed by a discussion on the preliminary results and methods. The participants were then briefed on the structured expert elicitation (classical/Cook’s) method and how it would be implemented for the workshop. The experts were asked to provide parameters for growth, reproduction, and donkeys’ working power for estimating the burden of disease in working donkeys (AHLE).

The afternoon session started with a briefing on the idea method used for attribution. The experts worked to attribute the three components of AHLE (mortality loss, working power loss, and reproduction loss) to three broad high-level causes: infectious, non-infectious, and external causes. A lot of discussion and debate was conducted to attribute the disease-related losses to the causes, with Ruth Jobling (Brooke) and Gina Pinchbeck (University of Liverpool) participating online.

After the attribution exercise, a general question and answer session on the study and methods was conducted. The participants expressed their happiness in participating in the study and workshop, and they looked forward to seeing the results of the study. They emphasised the importance of this study, especially for advocacy, policy, and working with the government for resource mobilisation for the poor working donkeys.