Assessment of Tobacco Control Policy Instruments, Status and Effectiveness in Africa: A Systematic Literature Review

INTRODUCTION: The tobacco industry has for decades been associated with environmental damage, health-related diseases, human rights violations and corruption issues. The World Health Organisation formulated the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control with the aim of controlling tobacco production and consumption. Most of the countries on the continent of Africa were also the target of the framework given the high importation and use of tobacco products. The main aim of this study was to find out the current status of tobacco control policies and their effectiveness in Africa. MATERIAL AND METHODS: This study was a systematic literature review that was conducted between the months of August and November 2020 by extracting data from the databases of PubMed, Elsevier Scopus and Web of Science. Only English articles were culled from the retrieved papers. Out of the 910 papers retrieved, only 17 papers from African countries were selected on the quality synthesis after meeting the inclusion criteria. RESULTS: The results of the study showed that three governance resources were identified of regulatory (64.70%, N=11) which had smoke-free environment, advertisement bans, and cessation programs, economics (29.41%, N=5) which were taxation measures and informative (5.886%, N=1) which were mass media campaigns. Furthermore, Western African countries especially South Africa reported many pronouncements on smoke-free environment and taxation measures. Mass media campaigns proved to be more effective policies as compared to others. CONCLUSION: This study recommends that the future research should be done on the effectiveness of mixed policy instruments as compared to single application. Furthermore, the researcher recommends the use of more informative policies in dealing with inelastic behaviours like those related to tobacco due to the addictive nature.