Improving hygiene practices in slaughterhouses in Western Kenya

TRAINING AND PROVISION OF MATERIALS
• Slaughterhouse workers at facilities assigned to Treatment 1 and Treatment 2 will be trained on hygiene practices by sub-county veterinarians. Butchers (slaughterhouse customers) will also be invited to the training, but will not be given incentives to attend. Training will include introduction to the incentive scheme given at the end, for facilities assigned to Treatment 2.
• At the training, the following equipment will be provided: handwashing station, soap and nail brush (to manager); cleaning buckets, brushes, detergent, and broom (to manager); supply of water treatment solution (to manager); gumboots: for all workers (to workers); aprons (to all workers)

MONITORING
• For all facilities in Treatment 1 and Treatment 2, the meat inspector responsible for the facility will be asked to fill out a hygiene monitoring form once per week, during one of their daily inspection visits. Inspectors will receive a payment of 300 KSH per form submitted.

INCENTIVES
• Workers in facilities assigned to Treatment 3 will receive a weekly incentive payment if hygiene practices at their facility meet the required threshold, according to the form submitted by the meat inspector.
• Incentive payments will be 50 KSH times the number of days the facility is normally open according to baseline data. Payments will be sent via MPesa and Airtel Money.
• Incentive payments will continue for 12 weeks after training.

2023-10-02

2024-02-11

- An index of hygiene practices observed at the slaughter facility.

Log CFU coliforms of swabs or samples collected from each of the following: a carcass swabbed just before sectioning, the knife used for sectioning, the hands of the worker sectioning this carcass, and water used to rinse equipment

Meat inspectors responsible for 150 slaughterhouses in Western Kenya will be assigned to one of three experimental groups: Control, Treatment 1 (training, equipment and monitoring), and Treatment 2 (training, equipment, monitoring and incentives). A baseline survey will be conducted prior to the initiation of any interventions. During this survey the following people will be interviewed at each slaughter facility: the on-site manager, up to 4 workers, up to 2 customers. Direct observations of hygiene practices will also be conducted. Two follow-up surveys will be conducted: the first during the period when incentives are being paid to workers in Treatment 2, and the second after incentive payments have stopped being paid. People holding the same positions as those interviewed at baseline will be interviewed during each follow-up survey round.

Randomization of meat inspectors to treatment groups will be conducted by a computer after stratifying by county. All facilities for which a meat inspector is responsible will be assigned to the same treatment group.

meat inspector

Yes

74 meat inspectors

143 slaughter facilities

approximately 24 to 25 meat inspectors per arm
approximately 48 slaughter facilities per arm

Assuming a correlation coefficient of 0.2 between pre-intervention and post-intervention measurements, and a correlation coefficient of 0.3 between post-intervention measurements, this design enables detection of differences between groups of 0.5 standard deviations with power 0.89, and of 0.4 standard deviations with power of 0.73. This assumes no intra-cluster correlation across facilities within meat inspector.