REEP & CRES conclude 4-year project on tobacco tax reform in West Africa

22 Jul 2022
22 Jul 2022

In May 2022, REEP wrapped up a four-year project, Tobacco Tax Reforms for Health and Economic Development in sub-Saharan Africa.

The project aimed to empower policymakers in the West African region by providing tools and evidence to improve tobacco tax policy in West Africa. In this project, REEP partnered with the Consortium pour la Recherche Économique et Sociale (CRES), based in Senegal, and the International Centre for Tax and Development (ICTD), based in the UK. The project was funded by the IDRC, in partnership with CRUK.

In 2017, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS, a bloc of 15 West African countries) adopted a new Directive for tobacco taxation policy, which had the goal of strengthening and harmonizing tobacco taxation policies in West Africa. The Directive requires a minimum ad valorem excise tax rate of 50% on ex-factory selling price of tobacco, as well as a specific excise tax of 0.02 US dollar per cigarette, cigar or cigarillo, and 20 US dollars per net kilogram for any other tobacco product. While the ECOWAS Directive provides a strong base on which ECOWAS members can strengthen their tobacco tax policies, eight ECOWAS countries also belong to the West African Economic and Currency Union (WAEMU). The WAEMU Directive is less stringent as it does not call for a specific excise tax. As a result, countries who are members of both WAEMU and ECOWAS may forgo implementing the (technically superior) ECOWAS Directive, and defer to the WAEMU Directive. This project focused on producing evidence and tools to support the implementation of the ECOWAS Directive, rather than the WAEMU Directive.

Various research outputs were produced under the project. Jean Tesche and Corné van Walbeek developed a multi-country ECOWAS simulation model that was published in Tobacco Control in 2020. This model can be used to advocate for the implementation of the ECOWAS Directive. Following this publication, Jean wrote a blog post, “West African governments must increase taxes on tobacco for better health and public finances”, which was published for World No Tobacco Day in 2021.

REEP researchers also published two other academic papers under the West Africa project, the first of which assesses the relationship between cigarette affordability and smoking initiation among youth in Ghana and can be found in BMJ Open. The second paper, which examines cigarette prices and smoking experimentation in Sierra Leone, was published in Tobacco Use Insights.

Our project partner CRES also produced various research outputs as part of the project. CRES researchers developed a cross-country tobacco taxation simulation model, which includes Ghana, Nigeria and Senegal. CRES wrote a research paper entitled Distributional effects of tobacco taxation in five ECOWAS countries, which analyses the impact of a tax increase on household expenditure on tobacco and health care, and on household income. The paper, which uses data from Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Senegal, and Togo, is under review at Tobacco Control. The CRES team also authored the paper Crowding out effect of tobacco expenditure on household spending in six ECOWAS countries, which measures how tobacco expenditure crowds out spending on food, health and education (the countries in the study are Burkina Faso, Ghana, Niger, Sierra Leone, Senegal and Togo). This paper has been submitted to International Health. Lastly, the CRES team is in the final stages of writing a paper titled Women's smoking experience in Nigeria: gender analysis, which investigates gender differences in smoking behavior in Nigeria.

Besides producing academic research, a core mandate of the project was to create partnerships within the region, which would advance tobacco control and tobacco taxation in West Africa. As part of this mandate, the project team, often lead by locally-based CRES, created relationships with members of ECOWAS, WAEMU, and local policymakers. We also created fruitful relationships with research groups and think-tanks in the region, such as the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER) of the University of Ghana, and the Center for the Study of the Economies of Africa (CSEA). ISSER participated in a workshop hosted by REEP on the use of REEP’s TETSiM economic model. The ISSER team followed REEP’s approach to cigarette price data collection, and this price data was used to model the effect of adopting a specific excise tax in Ghana, in addition to the existing ad valorem tax. From these efforts, a working paper entitled “Fiscal and Public Health Impact of a Change in Tobacco Excise Taxes in Ghana” was published.

As part of the partnership with CSEA, Corné van Walbeek supervised a Masters student, Abdul Gafar Abubakar Masa-ud for his thesis. This resulted in the publication of the paper, “Does tobacco expenditure influence household spending patterns in Ghana?: Evidence from the Ghana 2012/2013 Living Standards Survey” in Tobacco Induced Diseases.

REEP also provided CSEA with substantial inputs into the research products:

  • Giovanni Occhiali and Precious Akanonu. The Impact of Tax or Price Measures on Smoking Onset and Cessation in Nigeria. CSEA, 2021.
  • Adedeji Adeniran, Amara Mma Ekeruche, Marco Castradori. Illicit Tobacco in Nigeria. CSEA, August, 2020.
  • Corné van Walbeek, Adedeji Adeniran, and Iraoya Augustine. More on the Positive Fiscal and Health Effects of Increasing Tobacco Taxes in Nigeria. ICTD African Tax Administration Paper 25. June, 2021.

The COVID-19 crisis placed major restrictions on travel, thus making face-to-face meetings impossible. However, from 21 to 24 February 2022, the project hosted a regional workshop on tobacco taxation in Saly, Senegal. Hana Ross and Kirsten van der Zee from REEP, and Rhiannon McCluskey from ICTD attended the meeting, which was also attended by 20 representatives from the region, including members of WAEMU, ECOWAS and various Senegalese government ministries. The meeting provided an opportunity for stakeholders to engage on tobacco taxation.

While the pandemic posed challenges for our dissemination and policy engagement efforts, we nevertheless made progress in this. The project generated tobacco control country factsheets for the fifteen ECOWAS countries and these are available in both English and French online. The factsheets, which provide a snapshot of the tobacco control landscape, including smoking prevalence, the national cost of tobacco use, and tobacco tax policy in each country, are a valuable resource for policymakers and researchers, as well as a practical tool for local stakeholder engagement. We also distributed various blog posts, and ICTD produced a new online data visualization tool, which highlights the project’s scientific contributions. ICTD is currently producing a short, animated video that will bring awareness about tobacco taxation in the region. These simple tools are easy to use and can be widely shared to promote tobacco tax reform in the region.