NAIROBI,Kenya, Oct 19 — Kenya has only nine qualified animal health laboratory auditors, a shortage that could hamper efforts to expand accreditation and strengthen early detection of infectious diseases, a veterinary official has warned.
Romona Ndanyi, Deputy Director of Veterinary Services at the Directorate of Veterinary Services, Kenya said the country needed more trained auditors to assess laboratories, maintain quality standards and support facilities being established by county governments.
The warning comes as Kenya hosts a regional training workshop bringing together representatives from nine African countries to build a pool of trainers and auditors under the newly introduced QualiPath framework.
The initiative, supported through the World Bank-funded Health Emergency Preparedness and Response programme, seeks to strengthen animal health laboratory systems and improve their readiness to detect diseases that can spread from animals to humans.
“We have a pool of nine qualified auditors. The nine auditors are not enough,” Ndanyi said, explaining that Kenya had lost trained personnel through retirement and staff attrition.
She said the country had 10 laboratories under the Directorate of Veterinary Services, in addition to county laboratories that also required assessment, auditing and mentorship.
Kenya began its journey towards accreditation of animal health laboratories in 2017 and had secured accreditation for three laboratories by 2022, Ndanyi said.
The facilities have since maintained their ISO 17025:2017 accreditation, which sets requirements for the competence of testing and calibration laboratories.
However, she identified inadequate funding, staff shortages and the high cost of maintaining specialised equipment as major challenges facing the sector.
Some high-end laboratory equipment requires servicing by specialists who are not available locally, forcing authorities to seek maintenance services outside the country.
“Running laboratories is a very expensive affair,” she said, adding that limited recruitment had also affected the availability of personnel needed to deliver timely results.
The regional training is expected to help address some of these capacity gaps by equipping participants to train additional auditors and mentor laboratory staff at national and subnational levels.
Regional training
Dr Waqo Gufu Boru, a senior medical epidemiologis at IGAD, said the workshop was designed to develop a pool of personnel capable of conducting internal and external assessments of animal health laboratories.
Nine countries are represented at the workshop: Kenya, Malawi, São Tomé and Príncipe, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Burundi and Ethiopia. The wider programme covers 11 countries in Eastern and Southern Africa.
QualiPath provides a framework for monitoring laboratory performance and progressively strengthening quality management systems towards accreditation.
Boru said the programme would begin with baseline assessments of priority animal health laboratories in five countries in November, with assessments in the remaining participating countries planned for the following year.
The findings will help establish the capacity of existing laboratory systems and identify areas requiring improvement before further training and mentorship are rolled out.
Participants will subsequently be equipped with skills in quality management, auditing and mentorship, with regional training cascaded to national and subnational facilities.
One health approach
The initiative also seeks to improve coordination between animal, human and environmental health authorities under the One Health approach, which recognises the links between the health of people, animals and ecosystems.
Boru said stronger animal disease surveillance could give public health authorities more time to prepare for outbreaks before infections spread to humans.
“With a strong surveillance system in animal health, you can pick before it reaches human beings. You should be able to pick that in the animals,” he said.
He cited Ebola, mpox and influenza among the diseases highlighting the importance of closer coordination between animal and human health systems.
Ndanyi said animal health laboratories needed to produce credible and reliable results that authorities could use to make decisions on disease control and public health preparedness.
She added that trained personnel from the regional workshop would be assigned to support further training and mentorship in laboratories beyond the facilities represented at the meeting.
The programme aims to build a wider network of competent laboratory personnel and strengthen coordination across participating countries, improving their ability to identify emerging threats and respond to health emergencies.