Founded to promote animal health and welfare for human health and prosperity, Kyeema was formed by a group of Australian veterinary and agricultural scientists who wanted to promote a model of sustainable Newcastle disease (ND) control for village chickens kept by rural families globally. ND, which is endemic across Asia and Africa, kills 50-100% of chickens every time there is an outbreak, destroying the economic and food security of entire communities and contributing to the seasonal struggle with crop food shortages.

In the late 1980s, Professor Peter Spradbrow from the University of Queensland, with funding from the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research, developed a thermotolerant ND I-2 vaccine for village chickens. This vaccine does not rely on a stable chain of refrigeration for it to remain effective and is therefore extremely effective in areas where power supply is unreliable. In the late 1990’s, a comprehensive set of training materials for community-led ND vaccination campaigns were developed in Mozambique with Australian government support. In 2002, the Australian government funded Palladium (then GRM International) to implement a project to scale up these ND control activities and expand from Mozambique to Tanzania and Malawi. They also made the I-2 Master seed available to governments worldwide at no cost to developing countries that wanted to produce vaccines locally. The training materials developed have now been modified for use in many countries across Africa and Asia and are available free of charge on Kyeema’s website. Since 2020, we have been trialling the use of these materials as training videos and e-learning modules, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Read more about the history of the ND I-2 vaccine here.