When a cow dies unexpectedly in rural Ethiopia, the loss can devastate a family.
For many households that depend on livestock for income, food and survival, losing an animal can mean financial catastrophe. Losing livestock can leave families with difficult choices, including whether to eat or sell meat from animals that may have died from disease.
The practice is dangerous. Anthrax, a zoonotic disease transmitted between animals and humans, can spread rapidly through handling or eating infected meat. But public health experts working in Ethiopia found that simply telling people to stop was not enough.
Families understood the risks. What they often lacked was an alternative.
So communities came up with one themselves.
Researchers and practitioners from the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs will present next month at the 2026 International Social and Behavior Change Communication (SBCC) Summit in Panama City on how communities in Ethiopia adapted a centuries-old social support system known as “Idir” to help prevent the spread of anthrax.
Traditionally, Idir functions as a mutual aid association. In times of crisis, especially deaths in the family, community members contribute money or resources to support one another. Deeply rooted in Ethiopian social life, the system is built on trust, solidarity and collective responsibility.
During community dialogue sessions conducted as part of CCP’s work with the now-closed, USAID-funded Breakthrough ACTION project, residents proposed extending the model to livestock losses caused by anthrax.
The idea became known as “Idir for Cattle.”
Under the approach, community members contribute to support families whose livestock die from anthrax, creating a financial safety net that reduces pressure to sell, share or consume potentially infected meat.
The breakthrough, the authors argued, came not from importing a new intervention, but from recognizing the strength of a system communities had relied on for generations.
“It did not come from the outside,” says CCP’s Betemariam Alemu, who led the work in Ethiopia. “It came from within the community itself, where longstanding traditions of solidarity became the foundation for a public health solution.”
The intervention emerged from a broader effort to address zoonotic diseases in Ethiopia, where roughly 80 percent of the population depends on agriculture and has regular contact with livestock or domestic animals.
Anthrax remains one of the country’s immediately reportable diseases and tends to surge seasonally in farming areas during May and June.
From 2018 to 2023, the USAID-supported Breakthrough ACTION project worked with communities to better understand why risky practices persisted despite ongoing public health messaging.
Researchers conducted literature reviews, barrier analyses, and landscape mapping that identified several factors contributing to anthrax transmission, including misconceptions about the disease, low perceived risk, economic pressures, and longstanding cultural practices around meat sharing and raw meat consumption.
Rather than relying solely on top-down health education campaigns, the project emphasized community engagement.
Local storytelling helped frame anthrax prevention in familiar cultural terms. Religious leaders reinforced messages through trusted moral authority. Community dialogues created space for residents to openly discuss both risks and economic realities.
Those conversations led to locally generated solutions.
“By building on Idir, an institution that communities already trusted, the project was able to strengthen acceptance of safer practices without dismissing the social and economic pressures families faced,” Alemu says.
According to the authors, the approach not only helped reduce behaviors associated with anthrax transmission but also strengthened social cohesion and trust in public health interventions.
The researchers say the model may have implications beyond anthrax prevention.
Community leaders are now exploring whether “Idir for Cattle” could help inform broader policy discussions around a national livestock insurance scheme in Ethiopia.
The project highlights a growing recognition within social and behavior change communication that communities themselves often hold the foundations of sustainable solutions, says CCP’s Tegegn Shiferaw, a capacity strengthening and community engagement advisor.
“Indigenous systems like Idir are not obstacles to modernization,” she says. “They are powerful assets for change.”
