Botswana is one of the first African countries to become signatories to the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC). Botswana signed FCTC in June 2003 and ratified in 2005. Prior to this development, Botswana had enacted her first tobacco control legislation, the Control of Smoking Act (CSA) in 1992. The main focus of the act is on controlling Environmental supplier Nilotinib Tobacco Smoke in enclosed public and workplace, educational institutions and hospitals as well as to ban tobacco advertising. To date, the country has by far successfully implemented several key aspects of the

FCTC guidelines such as smoke free places, a ban on advertising and promotion of tobacco products, and sale to minors. However, the are no systems in place to check compliance [25]. The results of this study demonstrated that male teachers had a significantly higher prevalence of tobacco smoking than their female colleagues (10.8% vs 0.4%, p<0.001). Similar results have been found in other studies conducted in Japan where, only 3.1% and 44.7% of female and male teachers respectively, were smokers [26], and in Syria where 12.3% of female and 52.1% male

teachers were smokers [22]. In addition, 94% of smoking teachers in Bahrain were male teachers [14]. Comparably, other studies have also reported that smoking was higher among male than female teachers [9,16,27]. Interestingly, the results of studies conducted among primary school teachers in Belgaum City, India [15] and secondary school teachers in Yemen [8], indicated that female teachers in these studies did not smoke. Low prevalence of smoking among female teachers could be because traditionally it is a taboo for women to smoke. It has been suggested

that there are few female smokers than males especially in developing countries which could probably be related to social norm that has been long formed in many societies [9]. In this study, cigarette smoking was found to be associated with marital status (p=0.001). Similar findings were reported by Malay secondary school teachers [9]. School level (p=0.002) and body mass index (p=0.027) were also significantly associated with smoking among school teachers in Botswana. However, age, education level, number of children less than six years, length of employment, working hours and number of students taught were not significantly Batimastat associated with smoking. Smokers in this study indicated that they have been smoking for periods ranging from a year to 31 years with an average smoking duration of 8.62 years, smoking between one to 20 cigarettes a day. The average number of cigarettes smoked was 5.6 per day. The results also show that 5.3% of teachers in the study were ex-smokers having smoked for one to 27 years with average smoking years of 7.83 years. Various strengths and limitation were found for this study.