This volume presents the work initiated and executed under the African Tobacco Situational Analyses (ATSA), a recent major public health initiative sponsored by the Canadian government’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC). Conceived to illuminate the factors that will facilitate the reform of Africa’s major public health policies, this program focused particularly (but not exclusively) on policies concerning tobacco. The results, presented in this book, are an important contribution to the literature on global public health and international development, and comprise the most comprehensive evidence-based analysis of tobacco policy in the African region.
The country-level analyses of this study examine topics such as smoking prevalence, the status of relevant smoking-related policies, and the politics of public health policy reform – as well as the role played by the tobacco industry in each of these key areas. Sitting above these case studies is an overarching conceptual framework, operating with the expressed goal of creating generalizable lessons for the continent as a whole. Thus, ultimately this book permits the reader not only to grasp the depth and complexity of the tobacco situation in each country, but also to draw meaningful conclusions regarding what sort of public health policy reforms have been broadly successful across Africa – and how these successes might be replicated in the future.
