Experiences in One Health curriculum integration and international academic collaboration: a 17-year case study in a Colombian university

This community case study documents the experience of Universidad de La Salle, Bogotá, Colombia, in progressively embedding One Health (OH) into veterinary higher education between 2009 and 2026. Responding to global calls, including those of the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH), for curricula that move beyond siloed, discipline-bound training, the university built a scaffolded institutional model rather than a single flagship course. The experience is organized around six complementary pillars: international academic networks and mobility; knowledge generation and translation; undergraduate research seedbeds (semilleros); interdisciplinary and veterinary OH electives; the Colombian Observatory of Animal Health and Welfare; and experiential community outreach. Together, these pillars form a multi-level strategy grounded in Colombian rural and peri-urban realities that trains undergraduate, master’s and doctoral students to work across disciplines at the human–animal–environment interface, extending OH beyond agricultural sciences into engineering, optometry and architecture. Across the pillars, international cooperation acted as a catalyst for lasting institutional change, leaving research lines, postgraduate programmes and open educational materials that outlasted external funding. Semilleros and electives proved effective, low-cost entry points: students who completed the OH elective showed a broader, more systemic understanding of the approach. Experiential learning and sequenced content strengthened competencies such as antimicrobial stewardship, while alliances around agroecology, political ecology, rights of nature and One Welfare broadened OH beyond its disease-centred focus. Persistent challenges include dependence on a few institutional champions and time-bound partnerships; limited participation of human health, environmental and social sciences; largely cross-sectional, internal evidence without systematic evaluation of learning outcomes, community impact or graduates’ practice; and weak translation of evidence into policy in a country that still lacks a national OH joint plan of action. Achieved without large dedicated funding, this experience offers resource-constrained institutions in Latin America a potential roadmap for building durable, internationally connected and locally grounded OH education ecosystems, addressing the scarcity of published models from the Latin American region. A structured curriculum assessment is proposed as the next step to benchmark and guide further integration.