Study title

Practices around antibiotic use (ABU), such as drivers for use and administration of antibiotics, were unknown for small-scale pig farms in Kiambu County – a peri-urban area of Nairobi. Murungi et al. discussed food safety concerns owing to an increase in demand and therefore supply of pork in Nairobi, Kenya (2021). One such concern was that withdrawal periods after administering antibiotics were often not observed by small-scale pig farmers in peri-urban areas of Nairobi. Abattoir testing for antibiotic residues has since been completed from meat samples from one local independent abattoir (Bor et al., 2023) which is predominantly supplied by small farms in the immediate neighbouring areas (Murungi et al., 2021). This analysis found 41% of pork samples collected tested positive for the presence of antibiotic residues, adding to these food safety concerns. Therefore, this study aimed to understand ABU on small-scale pig farms in Kiambu County and offer possible future improvements in this area. To do this, we first wanted to understand which ABU collection method was most appropriate to understand ABU at the farm-level in this context. We undertook a problem identification and exploration project to evaluate methods for collecting instances of ABU in this specific context by trialling four methods in parallel: waste bucket analysis; medicine-recording sheets; weekly semi-structured interview and the ‘Drug Bag’. To evaluate these methods, we recruited 13 farms into the project. Following an initial interview, we placed waste buckets and medicine recording sheets onto the farms and visited farms approximately weekly for around one month. At each weekly visit, we carried out semi-structured interview to explore instances of ABU over the previous week and completed an audit of the waste bucket and medicine recording sheet. On the final visit we also completed the 'Drug Bag', which is an exercise in which participants sort a bag of antibiotics purchased from the...