Over the past 15 years, innovative approaches and tools have been developed and applied to evaluate health surveillance systems, in Southeast Asia and in Europe mainly. This work has allowed to better understand the local constraints observed in different contexts and to draw generic recommendations to improve health surveillance on a global scale. Acceptability of the strategies by all actors has been acknowledged as a key issue to ensure success of the actions along with the integration of private networks and actors within the surveillance system. This work helped in raising awareness among researchers, public decision-makers and private actors on evaluation issues, moving away from it being perceived as a control (audit) action often carried out by experts external to the issues and with limited benefits in return. In this regard, integrated evaluation, taking into consideration technical but also socio-economic issues in surveillance, should be promoted. This way, evaluation could be used as a programming tool, and in a participatory way to codevelop solutions with field actors to better inform decision-making in both animal and one health surveillance strategies