In particular, Senegal stands out as the only African country to regulate sex work through a specific public health policy that requires FSWs to register with a health centre.
The reluctance of FSWs to register is due to inherent flaws in the policy design, where the disadvantages of registration outweigh the benefits for FSWs.
To identify which modifications to the current registration policy have the potential to increase uptake of registration by FSWs and to assess their feasibility in the context of Senegal. The interview data were thematically coded using the interview topic guide and other recurring themes and analysed using thematic analysis on Nvivo A total of 20 relevant themes were selected, focusing primarily on assessing the feasibility of potential interventions and identifying potential barriers and associated risks.
We found that, without changing current legislation, improving relationships between FSWs and police officers, providing accurate and accessible information about the rules and benefits of the policy, and offering psychosocial support have the potential to improve both the registration rate of FSWs and their wellbeing.
The study highlighted that several national public health policies could be changed to increase the registration rate of FSWs and improve their wellbeing without overturning constitutional law. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
