JamiiVerify

Washington State University

JamiiVerify

"One search, one sample, one report" — empowering communities to verify and report antibiotic quality.

Nairobi County, Kenya

KEN

Nonprofit

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Substandard and falsified antibiotics are a critical but under-addressed driver of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in Kenya. These poor-quality medicines contribute to treatment failures, increased health costs, and undermine trust in human and animal health systems. In peri-urban areas around Nairobi, where informal settlements and small-scale poultry farming thrive, most people have no way to verify whether the antibiotics they use are effective, safe, or approved for use in Kenya. Studies show that 6-21% of human medicines in Kenya are substandard. Informal settlements, like Mathare and Kibera are hotspots for self-medication and often, people buy medication from informal vendors. Likewise, in our post-market surveillance studies, 51% of oxytetracycline samples from veterinary drug shops failed quality standards. Poultry farmers rely on oral formulations like oxytetracycline but lack tools to assess quality. This puts them at risk of productivity losses and the spread of AMR. Weak pharmacovigilance, porous supply chains, and limited access to official drug registries contribute to this problem. There is currently no mechanism through which citizens can verify antibiotic quality or flag suspicious products. JamiiVerify fills this gap and turns communities into frontline defenders of antibiotic safety.

JamiiVerify is a One Health digital verification and surveillance system that provides reliable information on registered antibiotics and educates users on responsible antibiotic use. It allows patients, human or animal health practitioners, medicine vendors, and other stakeholders to confirm whether an antibiotic is registered in Kenya. JamiiVerify cross-references national drug registries by the Pharmacy and Poisons Board (PPB) for human medicines and the Veterinary Medicines Directorate (VMD) for veterinary products. Users input a drug name via USSD (non-smartphone users) or WhatsApp to verify its registration. WhatsApp has a feature prompting users to upload a photo of the antibiotic packaging, and a system that collects basic community-level metadata. While text extraction from uploaded images is not yet active, this functionality will be developed to increase efficiency and enhance the use of JamiiVerify in detecting questionable products. Registered or non-registered products that are frequently searched, or unrecognized products, will be prioritized for sampling. On-site screening of product quality will be done using the WHO-endorsed GPHF Minilab, followed by confirmatory liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC MS/MS) testing at Strathmore University. Substandard, falsified, or withdrawn products will be flagged, and users alerted. aggregated data will feed into regulatory dashboards to inform drug inspections.

JamiiVerify serves the human and animal health sectors, targeting groups that are highly vulnerable to substandard and falsified antibiotics. These include: • Residents of informal settlement communities such as Kibera, Mathare, and Korogocho, who commonly lack access to structured health infrastructure and often fall prey to unregulated medicine vendors. • Patients and caregivers who rely on self-medication yet cannot verify the quality, safety, sources or legality of the medicinal products they purchase. • Community health workers (CHWs), agrovet and pharmacy attendants, who act as local health system touchpoints and need tools to detect and report suspicious antibiotics. • Poultry farmers—particularly in Nairobi, Machakos, and Kiambu counties—who rely on oral veterinary antibiotics like oxytetracycline for biosecurity against large flock losses. JamiiVerify provides a low-tech, highly accessible verification system that verifies whether a drug is registered in Kenya, encourages reporting of suspicious products, and shares alerts on lab-confirmed substandard or falsified medicines. By engaging communities in real-time surveillance and closing the feedback loop between field observations and lab confirmation, JamiiVerify protects human and animal health, reduces the risk of AMR, lowers treatment costs, and builds trust in the pharmaceutical system.