Côte d’Ivoire starts fitting electronic ear tags to livestock in December 2026, under a 12-month pilot to be launched officially on 21 November 2026. It covers 20,000 electronic ear tags for farm animals and 5,000 implantable chips for pets, with 62 tagging agents and seven supervisors to be trained and pilot zones already identified. Sidi Tiémoko Touré, minister of animal and fishery resources, gave the figures on 26 October 2026 at the third “rendez-vous de l’AIP”, an interview series run by the state news agency Agence Ivoirienne de Presse, in remarks reported by Abidjan.net on 30 October 2026.
The supplier is Vet’Tronic, a French animal-identification company based at Ancenis-Saint-Géréon that builds national identification systems around a secure central register. The Ministry of Animal and Fishery Resources (MIRAH), the Ivorian ministry for livestock and fisheries, signed a partnership convention with it on 5 August 2026 in Abidjan Plateau, covering electronic identification of livestock, pets, their owners and the premises concerned, according to AIP. Touré called it “une étape déterminante”, a decisive step. Vet’Tronic’s chief executive, Dr Walid Ammar, said the signature marked “l’entrée officielle de la Côte d’Ivoire dans l’ère de l’identification électronique animale”, the country’s official entry into the era of electronic animal identification, and pledged the project would become “une référence pour toute l’Afrique”, a reference for the whole of Africa.
On the kit, Vet’Tronic’s published specification is precise: ISO 11784/11785, FDX-B, 134.2 kHz. That is low frequency, the band the international animal-identification standards are built on, which is why a livestock programme uses LF rather than UHF. LF reads one tag at a time at close range, but the field copes with hide, muck and water, and any compliant reader reads any compliant tag. Our RFID glossary covers FDX-B and the LF animal standards.
Each animal gets a 15-digit permanent identifier opening with the country code 384 for Côte d’Ivoire; the company’s worked example is 384 000 000 000 028. Cattle and small ruminants, meaning sheep and goats, take an RFID ear tag in the left ear; pets and equids take an implanted ISO chip in the left side of the neck, four species groups on one register. Field applications work offline, the readers are ruggedised and agents are trained locally, which matters when tagging happens at a cattle market, not a desk. Vet’Tronic calls Côte d’Ivoire its first national reference, with five more West African countries in programme or in discussion.
The case is partly theft. MIRAH reports 2,350 ruminants stolen in 2025 and a herd of 4,767,243 cattle and sheep caught up in traceability concerns, particularly in border and transhumance zones. Touré said in August 2026 that electronic identification would give precise knowledge of animal numbers and movements, improve disease surveillance, strengthen the fight against livestock theft, protect farmers’ investments and ease market access. In July 2024 the ministry put livestock at about 3% of gross domestic product, more than 800 billion CFA francs, and more than 25% of the rural working population, some 4.5 million people.
None of this begins with the Vet’Tronic convention. MIRAH says the identification work has run since 2022, with consultations with the livestock interprofessions, a dedicated service inside the Directorate of Animal Production and manual technical tools built to the norms of UEMOA, the eight-country West African Economic and Monetary Union. The legal basis is decree no. 2024-665 of 1 August 2024, fixing the general rules for identifying animals, their owners and the premises concerned. The system was launched officially at Odienné on 12 July 2024, when Touré said identification was “obligatoire dorénavant”, compulsory from now on, and done electronically, Abidjan.net reported on 17 July 2024. It sits inside PONADEPA, the second-generation national livestock, fisheries and aquaculture policy, whose 2022 to 2026 edition was costed at 1,049,442,643,680 CFA francs.
How the company came to be chosen is contested. On 5 October 2026 the outlet Enquête Média published allegations about the convention, repeated the next day by the journalist Théophile Kouamouo in a video interview on his DLA (Décrypter l’Afrique) channel. MIRAH exercised its right of reply in a communiqué on 7 October 2026, saying some of the information put out contained “contre-vérités”, falsehoods, and reserving the right, as Koaci reported, to bring proceedings against those publishing and relaying what it calls untrue information.
To move from the manual system to identification at scale, MIRAH ran a selection procedure for a national provider under the Public Procurement Code, and a local firm was retained. Technical review by the ministry and by the ministry responsible for digital transition found shortcomings in integrating electronic identification, in the link between identification equipment and the software platform, and in large-scale deployment conditions. The ministry then looked at other operators, and talks with Vet’Tronic began. It referred the arrangement to the national public-private partnership steering committee (CNP-PPP) on 10 August 2026, and on 20 August 2026 wrote to the state IT company SNDI and the telecoms universal-service agency ANSUT about hosting, security, backup, service continuity, administration and reversibility. National herd data will be hosted and secured in Côte d’Ivoire, it says, under the 2013 personal-data protection law.
The pilot is free to the Ivorian taxpayer and paid for by the French operator out of its own resources, Touré said in October 2026, with generalisation to follow only after evaluation and sign-off by the institutional parties concerned.
Three things the published material does not settle: whether the arrangement is formally a public-private partnership or a concession, as the CNP-PPP has it but the instrument is unnamed; what farmers will pay once the free pilot ends, with no tariff published; and how long the contract runs. For anyone supplying LF animal tags or readers into West Africa, those answers decide whether 25,000 pilot devices turn into a national fleet. We follow the bands and the standards behind programmes like this in our Animal Tagging coverage.
