The Current Landscape of Research on World Health Assembly Targets in West Africa: Two interdependent Review Outputs

Abstract

The WHA 2025 nutrition targets have been used to track countries’ nutritional situations, measure progress in reducing malnutrition, and guide decision making. With a little more than five years remaining to attain the WHA targets, it is a critical time to coordinate the nutrition community across policy, programmes, research towards action. West Africa is one of the regions where progress on the six WHA targets has been insufficient.

To inform policy-relevant and stakeholder-informed decision-making, TNWA applied a systematic mapping approach to identify and catalogue the existing peer-reviewed evidence on WHA targets in the region in a comprehensive and transparent way (here forth referenced as mapping review). Furthermore, building on this systematic map, we will assess the value of research on the drivers of malnutrition in the region through applying a comparative methodological approach, i.e., considering both health and social science literature (here forth referenced as methodological review).