Operating a Pharmacy legally after the PPB crackdown: what inspectors actually check

In June 2026 PPB inspected 155 premises in Nairobi and Kajiado over the course of a week. It closed 48 of them and 95 people were arrested. If your reaction to that is "well, those were the unlicensed ones", read section 20(1B) of the Act before you relax. The offence that catches ordinary, licensed, well-meaning pharmacies is not operating without a licence. It is operating without a licensed professional actually in the room.

This guide sets out what the law requires, what the penalties really are, and what an inspector will look at. The legal detail comes from the Pharmacy and Poisons Act Cap 244 and PPB's own guidelines. Where the public record runs out, it says so.

The rule most honest owners get wrong

Section 20(1B) says it plainly:

"No person shall operate the business of a pharmacist or pharmaceutical technologist without the presence of a registered pharmacist or enrolled pharmaceutical technologist in the premises where such business is being carried out."

Read that again, because the wording does a lot of work. The requirement is presence. Not a name on a certificate, not a contract in a drawer, not a professional who is reachable by phone. If your pharmacy is open and no licensed professional is physically there, the business is being operated unlawfully, however good your paperwork is.

PPB's premises guidelines say the superintendent must be present at all times when the pharmacy is open, and must not hold a full-time job elsewhere.

This is the heart of what people call licence renting. Sometimes it is deliberate, where a professional lends their name to premises they have never visited. Very often it is not. It is a superintendent who took a second job, or who covers two branches, or who stepped out for the afternoon while an unqualified assistant served customers. The law does not distinguish by intention.

One superintendent, one premises

PPB states it directly: one person can only superintend over one premises at a time. You may employ several pharmacists and technologists in one place, but only one of them is the superintendent.

If you own two branches, you need two superintendents. There is no version of this where one professional covers both.

Where a company owns the pharmacy, section 21 requires the superintendent to be a registered pharmacist who is also a member of the board of directors, and who is not acting in that capacity for any other body corporate.

Who may dispense

Section 19(1)(b) prohibits an unregistered person from preparing, mixing, compounding or dispensing any drug except under the immediate supervision of a registered pharmacist. Again, note the word immediate. An assistant dispensing while the pharmacist is out is not supervised.

What the penalties actually are

Here is a point worth being careful about, because a great deal of published material on this is simply wrong.

You will frequently see the penalty for operating unregistered premises quoted as KES 30,000. That figure is out of date. It was raised by the Pharmacy and Poisons (Amendment) Act of 2019. The 30,000 figure belongs to a different section covering different offences, so it is not even a near miss.

From the consolidated Act:

Section	Offence	Maximum penalty
23(1), (6)	Carrying on business other than in registered premises	KES 1,000,000 or 3 years, or both
20(1B), (2)	Operating without a licensed professional present, and display failures	KES 1,000,000 or 1 year, or both
19(1), (2)	Unregistered person carrying on the business, dispensing without immediate supervision, or misusing the title "chemist" or "pharmacist"	KES 30,000 or 3 years, or both
30(3)	Poisons Book failures	KES 100,000 or 3 years, or both

Two further provisions deserve attention.

Section 23A governs closure of deregistered or unsuitable premises. The Board must give at least fourteen days' written notice, and closure follows if the problem is not remedied. That notice period is your window to fix something, so do not file it and hope.

Section 49 is the one to read twice. Every director, secretary and manager of a company is personally liable for the company's offence, unless they can prove it happened without their consent or connivance and that they exercised due diligence to prevent it. Incorporating does not put a wall between you and this. If you are a director of a company that owns a pharmacy, these penalties can reach you personally.

Separately from the courts, PPB can deregister or refuse to renew through its own disciplinary process. In practice that is the sanction most likely to end a business.

Inspections have changed

PPB issued a notice in October 2025 on risk-based inspections of pharmaceutical premises, applying to the 2026 licensing cycle. Retail pharmacies and wholesalers are now inspected on a risk basis rather than uniformly.

The grading matters because it tells you how much room you have:

• Any critical deficiency, or more than seven major deficiencies: non-compliant.
• One to six major deficiencies: corrective action required within 30 days.
• Minor deficiencies only: verified at the next routine inspection.

Inspectors enter under section 45 and may seize evidence. Obstructing an inspector is itself an offence under section 48. Arguing with an inspector is never the winning move.

What a compliant pharmacy has in place

Walk your own shop against this list.

Licences, current and displayed. Section 20(1) requires the name and certificate of registration of the person in control to be conspicuously exhibited. PPB's guidelines add that the displayed name must match the Register of Premises and the professional register exactly. No nicknames, no abbreviations, no trading name standing in for the registered one. Licences now carry a photograph and a QR code that the public can scan.

A licensed professional present whenever you are open. Covered above, and it is the single most likely thing to fail.

Your registers. The Poisons Book under section 30 records the date, the purchaser's name and address, the poison and quantity, the stated purpose, and the purchaser's signature. The Prescription Book under section 31 must be written up within twenty four hours. Records are kept for two years from the last entry, prescriptions stay on the premises and readily available for inspection, and the books are open to inspection at all reasonable times under section 47(2).

Corporate documents to hand. Incorporation certificate or BN3, a current CR12, KRA PINs, the owner and superintendent contract if you are not the superintendent yourself, and the premises sketch plan.

Storage and layout that meets the premises standards, which we cover in our guide to PPB licence requirements.

One term to retire: the DDA register. The Dangerous Drugs Act was repealed. We could not verify a currently prescribed format or retention period for a controlled drugs register specifically, so we are not going to invent one. Keep your controlled drugs records meticulously and confirm the current requirement with PPB.

Check your own status in two minutes

PPB's licence status page is public and needs no login. You can search by name or registration number at practice.pharmacyboardkenya.org/LicenseStatus, covering pharmacists, pharmaceutical technologists and licensed premises.

Do this for your premises and for your superintendent, today. It is free, it takes two minutes, and finding a lapse yourself is considerably better than an inspector finding it. One practical note: use the full subdomain. The bare domain without a prefix fails its security certificate.

Remember too that every PPB licence expires on 31 December, and a renewal lodged more than thirty days after expiry attracts a penalty of 10 per cent of the standard fee. PPB confirmed in February 2026 that penalties were in effect for that cycle.

Being straight about what we do not know

The crackdown was announced by PPB's chairperson in December 2025 as taking effect from January 2026, covering the whole supply chain from community pharmacies to manufacturing sites and points of entry, with offenders risking deregistration and court action.

The June 2026 operation described at the top of this guide is the largest action we could verify. Beyond it, we could not confirm from any public source whether the campaign has continued through the second half of 2026. We found no PPB statement or credible report of enforcement activity between August and October 2026. So we are not going to tell you it is ongoing, and we are not going to tell you it is over. We do not know, and neither does anyone else writing about it.

Be careful with what you read elsewhere on this. Several widely shared articles about mass closures are genuinely old, from 2022 and 2024, and resurface looking current.

One more thing on the horizon. New Good Pharmacy Practice standards have been reported as commencing on 1 January 2027, tiering superintendent roles by facility level and restricting some narcotics dispensing to pharmacists, which the Kenya Pharmaceutical Association has contested on behalf of technologists. The only version PPB publishes is a draft with an unsigned approval block and a placeholder effective date. Watch it, but do not restructure your staffing around it yet.

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This guide reflects the Pharmacy and Poisons Act Cap 244 as consolidated to December 2023, PPB guidelines and notices published to October 2026, and dated press reporting of enforcement actions. Penalties stated are statutory maximums, not predictions of what a court will impose. Confirm your own position with PPB, and treat this as general guidance rather than legal advice.

If you want an honest assessment of where your pharmacy stands before somebody else makes one, book a compliance review.