Characteristics of the study population
The mean age of the respondents was 27 years (±6.3). Majority (78.6%) of the women were married and slightly above half (57%) had attained secondary school education. Over two-fifths (44.1%) of the participants were housewives. Their mean monthly household income was KES 14975.2 (±17618.7). The socio-demographic, perinatal and breastfeeding characteristics of the respondents are shown in Table 1. Only 27.3% were aware of human milk banking. Sources of information were mainly hospital staff (69.3%) and the media (19.8%). Table 2 provides details on awareness and experience with human milk banking.
The majority (78.1%) of the respondents indicated they would be willing to donate human milk while 70.8% indicated they would feed their babies’ donor human milk. Willingness to donate breast milk was primarily (89.1%) attributed to the positive feeling the mothers would get by helping other babies. Slightly more than half (55.9%) of the respondents who were reluctant to feed their infants donor human milk cited fear of disease transmission (Table 3).