PROTOCOL TO CONDUCT A SCOPING REVIEW ON LEAD EXPOSURE ASSESSMENT IN CHILDREN IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

Lead exposure is posing a major public health concern, especially among children and protecting African children from lead is still becoming a challenge. There is a need for a comprehensive literature review study in order to gather data that could be used for policy makers to put in place measures for monitoring lead exposure and also to use the data for awareness on the exposure levels and the effects on children. The main objective is to find out the extent, nature, and scope of existing literature on lead exposure in Children and its health impacts in Sub-Saharan Africa while the specific objective are to assess the extent of available literature on lead exposure in children in Sub-Saharan Africa, to assess the sources and pathways of lead exposure among children in Saharan Africa and to evaluate the evidence exists on health effects of lead exposure in children in Saharan Africa. We will conduct the review using the JBI scoping framework proposed by Arksey and O’Malley [16], which will be enhanced by the works of Levac et al and Peters et al. The framework stipulates at most 9 stages of a clear and effective scoping exercise. As a standard reporting method on how studies were selected, we will use a PRISMA chart to show a step-by-step process of how studies were assessed, how many were excluded and for which reason, as well as how many were finally included in the study. We will conduct an advanced literature search of study articles from six electronic databases; PubMed, Cochrane Library, Web of Science, Scopus, Science Direct, and Research4Life. We will create a standardized data charting form and include extraction of data on citation details. The purpose of extracting all this data will be to obtain key study characteristics and concepts related to objectives of our study. We will present and describe findings from our review using charts, figures and tables.