Environmental Health Risk Assessment in Childcare Facilities: A Review of Existing Assessment Tools and the Case for a Context-Specific, Multi-Domain Framework in Nigeria

Childcare facilities bring infants and young children together in shared indoor and outdoor spaces for long periods each day. This matters because children are especially vulnerable to environmental hazards due to their physiology, behavior, and stage of development. Based on literature and policy materials, this review found no published and validated multi-domain tool for assessing and prioritizing environmental health risks across childcare facilities in Nigeria. The review focused on four areas: (1) whychildren are particularly susceptible to environmental hazards; (2) existing childcare environmental health assessment and checklist approaches; (3) early-childhood standards and environmental health evidence relevant to Nigeria and sub-Saharan Africa; and (4) established methods such as the Delphi technique, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), and content-validity assessment that could support framework development. The tools available at the time were mainly checklist or compliance based and generally did not produce a weighted overall risk score. Oversight was also often split among licensing, health, building, and other authorities, making it difficult to assess environmental risks across several domains at once. Nigeria had national minimum standards forearly child-care centers covering health, sanitation, nutrition, safety, and related conditions, but the literature reviewed did not identify a validated environmental health risk-scoring tool designed specifically for Nigerian childcare facilities. Established Delphi, AHP, and content-validity methods offered a sound basis for developing one. The review therefore identified a clear methodological and practice gap and provided the rationale for developing and validating a context-specific, multi-domain, weighted environmental health risk-assessment framework for Nigerian childcare facilities.