Kathrin Loosli provides insights into a project that aims to inform antimicrobial resistance planning in eastern Africa
What is your project? – My PhD, titled “Antibiotic quality, access, demand and use in rural communities of northern Tanzania”, which was run under the overall project titled SNAP-AMR, or supporting the national action plan for antimicrobial resistance. The project investigates where and how people access antibiotics in rural Tanzania, how they use them and what the quality of their provision is. This is for antibiotics in both humans and animals.
Where are your field sites and what are they like? – My three field sites, or villages, where I collected my data are in Northern Tanzania, in three different districts: Ngorongoro, Misungwi and Mwanga.
The village in Ngorongoro is situated in open grasslands, where the residents are pastoralists who live in mud huts spread out on the plains. While the grass is golden during the dry season, the area becomes very green in the wet season, but also muddy.
The Misungwi community, near Lake Victoria, is surrounded by fields of rice and corn, while the climate is very hot and humid. The residents live in brick houses, which are shaded by fruit trees, such as large mango trees, grown in the vicinity. The mango trees are gigantic!
The community in Mwanga is on mountain slopes, with fields and houses being hard to access where the slopes are quite steep. The houses are well built, while the people have cows or goats at home in stables and fields of corn, beans or other veggies. The climate is very hot down in the valley, but it cools down a bit up in the mountains.
When did you do your fieldwork, for how long were you in the field, and how did you get there? – I spent time in Tanzania from September 2021 to February 2022 for fieldwork, which spans the short rainy season, spending a minimum of two weeks in each community. We, me, the field team and other researchers from the SNAP project, also went back to the communities for feedback rounds on the project in January 2023, spending approximately one week in each district.
To access the field sites, we took a car. From Moshi, a bigger city, we take about 4 hours to go to Mwanga, 8 to Ngorongoro and 14 to Misungwi. The car is always super packed with luggage, food, water, flipchart and all the other stuff we need for the fieldwork.
Where did you stay in the field? – We usually stayed in hostels, some of them a bit better than others. I always got my own room and bath. The rooms usually had electricity and a good bed with bednet. I only once had problems with huge cockroaches in the room and the bednet literally saved my life. The hostels have running water, but it is often not hot, so I usually showered out of a bucket of hot water. Toilets are mostly standing toilets, but clean and sanitary. We went to restaurants to have food three times a day and did not cook ourselves. Sometimes I bought fruits from the local market if available. They have the best mangoes!
What data did you gather for the project? – I mostly interviewed households and health providers (including doctors at local health posts, but also pharmacists and other drug sellers in retail shops). In truth, my field team interviewed them while I was trying to keep up with what was being said in Swahili. We bought antibiotics sold by the local health providers to bring them to people’s houses and discuss the samples – called the drug bag method. The interviews were taped, but we also recorded answers in a survey sheet. The health providers were then interviewed, and answers collected in a survey sheet. We also did observations at all health outlets to see how providers and patients interact, what kind of drugs were bought, and what kind of advice was given out about them.
What have you learned from being in the field? – I learnt how important it is to involve local leaders in research, making sure we are on good terms, that they are informed about what we do and with whom, and also clearly explain why this is something good or positive for the community. In that sense, doing feedback rounds to give information back to people and talk about problems we found is crucial. Research needs to be a two-way street and we need to really be open to learn from people’s lived experiences.
Is there anything you think more people should know before heading into the field? – Being vegetarian or vegan is going to be very hard as most people in these communities eat meat three times a day. Fieldwork needs a lot of energy, so be prepared to maybe relax such dietary restrictions. Also bring your favourite treats from the UK (like milk chocolate) as you will not be able to find them in Tanzania. And take time off to wander and visit around; Tanzania (or really any other part of the world you’ll go) is so beautiful and it would be a waste to not at least take a weekend off to explore!
Do you have any funny anecdotes from your field trips? – During the feedback sessions someone asked us what we think about the practice of some people to make sour milk using paracetamol. People in the area sell soured milk as a drink, or like we would use sour cream for cooking. Apparently, someone found out that milk goes off faster when they mix it with paracetamol. Amazing!
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Kathrin for submitting a fieldwork diary to Naturally Speaking and shedding some light on the work that was carried out. If you would like to read more about Kathrin’s time in Tanzania, please see the following link for Kathrin’s PhD blog https://habariyatanzania.wordpress.com/. The responses to the questionnaire were edited by Max Hadoke.
If you are a researcher within the School of Biodiversity, One Health and Veterinary Medicine and would like to submit a fieldwork diary, please download the questions using the following link and follow the instructions in the document.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1e5C8NUew5xFpEl_OPgH-yAjekmoc84OTLol0_eVoDL0/edit?usp=sharing
Banner image of Wildlife Watching in Ngorongoro taken by Kathrin Loosli