African abattoirs: a scoping review of practices, factors influencing implementation of good practices, and recommended solutions for improvement.

Background: In Africa, ongoing challenges posed by zoonotic foodborne diseases highlight the need to improve control practices. This review aims to present a structured overview by summarizing documented practices in African abattoirs, factors influencing the implementation of either poor or good practices, and the recommended solutions to enhance good practices.

Methods: This scoping review followed the PRISMA-ScR guidelines, the Arksey and O'Malley methodological framework, and the Population-Concept-Context framework. To identify relevant articles, searches were conducted across the Scopus, PubMed, PubMed Central, ScienceDirect, and Web of Science databases, along with additional records from African Journal Online, Google, and Google Scholar.

Results: Out of 1,547 identified articles, 91 that met the eligibility criteria were included in the final analysis. These studies were conducted in 12 African countries, including Nigeria, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Sudan, Cameroon, Morocco, South Africa, Uganda, Tanzania, Egypt, and Sierra Leone. The review identified several poor meat-processing practices, such as a lack of inspections, unhygienic processing, inadequate cleaning, improper meat storage, and poor waste disposal. On the other hand, the current scoping review identified good practices, such as documenting and reporting inspection findings, waste treatment, waste reuse, timely meat delivery, and the reversal of these poor practices. Barriers to good practices were weak policies, lack of basic infrastructure and facilities, insufficient funds, absence of supervision, poor enforcement, poor information flow, lack of knowledge, and inadequate training. Good practices were facilitated by factors like available policy, the establishment and use of critical control points, and basic infrastructure and facilities. Results of the present scoping review also demonstrate that recommended solutions for improvement include following guidelines, developing policies, better enforcement, providing basic infrastructure and facilities, providing training, collaboration, and adopting the One Health approach.

Conclusions: This scoping review identified a range of poor and good practices and factors that influence the implementation of such practices and recommended improvement solutions. Overcoming barriers and leveraging facilitators are essential for improvement and require collaboration among stakeholders. Furthermore, research is needed to validate the effectiveness of the recommended solutions.