In order to understand the current of safety standards and problems for animal source foods, a study was conducted in six sub-Saharan African countries - Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, South Africa and Tanzania. The objective was to review food safety policy and regulations and their implementation, food safety status in terms of a number of criteria e.g. nature of public health problems and regularity of testing such problems, prevalence of food-borne diseases of international and developing country importance, probability of inspection of various retail food outlets and the type of risk assessment and traceability systems being used in the animal source food supply chains.