By Lenah Bosibori
Kenya must develop a stronger pathway for integrating traditional medicine into the formal health system while ensuring safety, scientific evidence, and protection of indigenous knowledge, experts have said.
Christine Yakhama, coordinator of community programmes working with women living in and around Kakamega Forest, speaking during the Culture of Science Conference 2026 in Nairobi, said that traditional medicine should not be judged using standards designed for conventional medicine.
“The knowledge did not begin in a laboratory. It was observed, tested, remembered, refined and transmitted across generations,” Yakhama says.
She added that safety standards should not be lowered in ways that expose patients to ineffective, contaminated or unsafe products. “Moving traditional medicine from community practice into the national health system requires a regulatory pathway that recognizes different forms of evidence,” she added.
This includes identifying plants, documenting traditional use, assessing the quality and safety of preparations and generating evidence on their effectiveness.
“Long-standing traditional use has provided an important starting point, but it does not automatically establish clinical effectiveness for every indication,” she says.
Dr. Maureen Bilinga Tendwa, Director of the Global Phytomedicine Institute, said African countries also need a multidisciplinary approach when evaluating herbal medicines. “We find that most of the countries go wrong when they take a typical pharmacist to evaluate herbal medicine,” she says.
She added that regulators should bring together researchers, clinical herbal medicine practitioners and indigenous knowledge holders rather than relying only on pharmacists trained in conventional medicine.
She also called for stronger research into medicinal plants and efforts to introduce phytomedicine training in African universities. “The aim, she says, should be to move research “from the farm to the bedside.”
Dr. Jonah Njoroge, CEO and founder of Dr. Spice Organics Kenya, said the process must begin with correctly identifying the plants being used. “Correct identification eliminates errors, guesswork, and inconsistent outcomes,” he said.
Njoroge adds proper handling, organic farming practices, controlled drying, and laboratory testing are also necessary to ensure consistent quality and safety. His organization has developed an encyclopedia documenting more than 500 herbs, including their active compounds, traditional uses and potential risks.
But experts say regulation is not only about the medicine itself. It is also about protecting patients who move between traditional healthcare. Dr Felista Mutuma, a pharmacist, added that health workers sometimes discover that patients have used herbal medicine only after complications develop.
She cited the case of a woman who arrived at a health facility with complications after using herbal medicine during childbirth. “If a medicine such as oxytocin does not work as expected, she said, the consequences can be severe.”
Yakhama added that better documentation could help close this gap. “A community-based evidence system being developed around Kakamega brings together traditional and indigenous medicine practitioners, elders, community health promoters and people documenting local biodiversity,” reiterated Yakhama.
The system records the medicine used, the condition it was intended to treat, how it was prepared, perceived benefits, adverse effects and referral experiences. Practitioners involved in the initiative are also developing referral systems so patients can move between traditional healthcare when necessary.
Dr Mutuma said clients can be given records showing what they have been taking and for how long. “This information can help healthcare workers understand what substances may still be present in a patient’s system and determine appropriate treatment.”
But the experts say patients must also be treated with respect. Dr Mutuma added that some healthcare workers can be dismissive when patients disclose that they have used herbal medicine, particularly pregnant women.
“Instead of judging patients, health workers should ask why they used the medicine, explain potential risks and guide them towards safer treatment,” added Dr Mutuma.
Another concern is ownership. Yakhama says traditional knowledge should not automatically become public information simply because researchers are interested in studying it. “Consent, community ownership, intellectual property rights, provenance, access and benefit sharing have to be built into this process,” she said.
Participants questioned how communities that have preserved knowledge about medicinal plants for generations can benefit when that knowledge contributes to the development of a pharmaceutical or other commercial product.
Yakhama added that communities have been referred to as a “library” that has preserved information for decades, only for outsiders to extract the knowledge without giving communities ownership or benefits.
She added that Kakamega Forest should therefore not be viewed simply as a source of plants waiting to be commercialized but as a living library of biological and cultural knowledge.
“A library is valuable when its knowledge is preserved, its authors are respected, its contents are properly understood, and when we know how to distinguish a promising claim from reliable evidence,” she says.
Experts also called for increased government investment in research into traditional medicine and also warned that some promising research programmes struggle to attract funding, while products promoted as miracle cures can reach consumers without sufficient evidence.
For Kenya, experts say stronger regulation, research, documentation, and community participation could help create a system where traditional medicine is assessed for safety and effectiveness while the communities that have protected the knowledge remain part of its future.