Mitigating Anti-Microbial Resistancein the Environment: A One Health Governance Analysis in Kenya

This paper shows that despite Kenya’s formal commitment to a One Health approach, environmental dimensions of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) remain largely overlooked in policymaking and implementation. While Kenya has coordination platforms, legal frameworks, and surveillance systems, these are dominated by human and animal health actors, leaving environmental agencies underrepresented, underfunded, and without clear mandates. As a result, critical environmental AMR pathways—such as contaminated wastewater, effluents from slaughterhouses and farms, polluted rivers, and poor waste management—receive far less attention than clinical or veterinary issues. Structural obstacles including limited inter-agency communication, political power imbalances, fragmented responsibilities, and weak enforcement further undermine integrated action. The paper argues that effective AMR mitigation requires elevating environmental institutions to equal partners, embedding AMR safeguards in environmental regulation and monitoring, allocating dedicated budgets, and developing specific environmental-AMR indicators and targets. Strengthening these governance mechanisms is essential to operationalizing One Health in practice and preventing the continued spread of AMR through environmental routes.