Assessments of tobacco control policy instruments status and effectiveness in Africa; A systematic literature review

Abstract Background: Tobacco is one of the well-established industries in the world. Despite having some economic benefits, the industry has been for decades associated with environmental problems through deforestation, health related diseases that cause about 8 million mortality rates yearly, human rights violations and corruptions issues which are involved, World Health Organization formulated Framework Convention on Tobacco Control with the aim of controlling tobacco production and consumption, with countries from Africa being ones where its usage is increasing more. Objectives: The main aim of this study was to find out the current status of tobacco control policies and its effectiveness in Africa. Methods: This study was a systematic literature reviews that was conducted between the months of August and November 2020 through extracting data from the database of PubMed, Scopus, Google scholar and Research Gate. Only English articles were selected. Results: Out of 910 papers retrieved only 17 papers from African countries were selected on the quality thesis after meeting the inclusion criteria. The results of the study showed that three governance resources were identified of Regulatory 64.70 % N=14 which had Smoke free environment, Advertisement bans, and cessation programs, economics 24.41% N=6 which were taxation's measures and informative 5.886% N=1 which were mass media campaigns. Further, Western African countries especially South Africa reported many pronouncements on smoke free environments and taxation measures. Mass media campaigns proved to be more effective policy as compared to others. Conclusion: This study recommends that future research should be done on looking at the effectiveness of mixed policy instruments as compared to single application. Further, the researcher recommends the use of more informative policies in dealing with inelastic behaviors like those related to tobacco due to the addictive nature.