Rationale
The first confirmed case of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Africa and sub-Saharan Africa were respectively announced on the February 14 and 27, 2020 in Egypt and Nigeria [1,2]. This was correspondingly two weeks after (January 30, 2020) and one month before (March 11, 2020) the categorization of the outbreak as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) and as a pandemic [3]. According to the Africa branch of the Centre for Disease Control (Africa CDC), on August 1st 2021, they were overall 170,187 COVID-19 related death, the most impacted region being the southern one [4]. Aside its well-recognized and highlighted human and economic consequences, this pandemic also affected the education sector, especially at the university level [5,6].
In order to reduce the spread of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-Cov-2), numerous governments, under the recommendations of national and international health institutions, have had to reorganize university programs [6,7]. These reorganizations notably involved the closure of universities (especially during lockdown periods), the suspension of face-to-face classes with or without the establishment of distance learning, and this also in Africa [6,8,9]. The reshaping of higher education in response to the COVID-19 pandemic had negative corollaries on universities students’ wellbeing not only in terms of academic performances[5,10,11], but also regarding the psychological sphere [12–14]. Indeed, published studies reported high frequencies of mental health issues such as depression, anxiety and stress among universities’ students during the current COVID-19 pandemic [14–16]. This not only due to the remodelling of university education negatively influencing their learning processes, but also as a consequence of stressors such as social distancing, loneliness, fear of infection regarding themselves or relatives, and the uncertainty of future [12,13,16]. Otherwise, all the currently existing studies summarizing data on this issue pertain to European, American or Asian settings [16–18].
Considering the unstable evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide, its reported impact on universities students’ well-being amid other settings, and the lack of papers summarizing such information for Africa, we carried out this review.