Consideration of adolescent nutrition in Senegalese policies: a scoping review

Background and objectives: Adolescents have only recently been recognized as a priority nutrition target group at global level. Although some nutrition interventions are implemented, there is a lack of data on their nutritional status and diet to guide them, especially in developing countries. This work aimed to identify adolescent nutrition gaps in policies in Senegal compared to the global level. Methods: A Literature review was carried out to collect global guidelines on adolescents from the health organization websites and PubMed. Then, the official websites of the 12 sectors involved in the multisectoral strategic plan for nutrition in Senegal were visited to collect national documents using the following keywords: policy, nutrition, adolescent, sector, letter, program, plan, and strategy. Other global and national relevant documents were also collected from main resource persons of the different sectors. Documents were identified and reviewed by using key words such as nutrition, adolescent, indicator. An Excel template was developed and used to collect data on strategic areas, nutrition interventions, gender mainstreaming, multisectoriality, nutrition indicators and to analyze its consideration according to World Health Assembly (WHA) targets. Results: Overall, 11 global and 52 national documents were collected and reviewed. The main gaps identified in global policies were the missing of specific target and nutrition and dietary indicators for adolescents. At national level, only 16 documents mentioned directly the adolescents and 7 of its mentioned nutrition among adolescents, especially in health and education sectors. Only health sector included adolescent nutrition indicators and 3 sectors included nutrition interventions. Gender mainstreaming among adolescents were poorly highlighted in documents, only in 6 documents. The difference by sex was not consider in nutrition indicators. In comparison to the global level, Senegal was aligned to supplementation intervention but not to obesity and overweight indicator. Dietary and wasting indicators were also identified as gaps at global and national level. Conclusions: This review revealed limited information that reflected the low level of adolescent nutrition consideration in Senegalese policies. Therefore, further attention should be paid to the definition of indicators and interventions and a better consideration of gender at national level.