All research articles and content published in the Pan-African Journal of Health and Environmental Science (AJHES) are freely accessible to the public immediately upon publication under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CCBY-NC 4.0) license. This means that readers can read, download, copy, distribute, and link to the articles as long as they comply with the terms outlined in the CC BY-NC 4.0 license. The authors retain full copyright ownership of their work.