22% of teenagers have had sex - government

Kampala. The Ministry of Health yesterday said 22 per cent of adolescents have ever had sexual intercourse and urged them to abstain until adulthood in order to check the increasing incidence of teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.

The 2014 Uganda Bureau of Statistics census put Uganda’s population at 34.6 million with 34.8 per cent of them being adolescents. This translates into 12.1 million adolescents of which 22 per cent (2.6 million) are reported to have had sex.

“Twenty-two per cent adolescents have ever had sexual intercourse,” Dr Placid Mihayo, the ministry senior Gynaecologist, said at a media briefing in Kampala yesterday.

He added: “We should encourage girls to remain in school and those who are not in school should avoid getting married too early and abstain. We need support from all corners. We need support from parents, teachers, religious leaders by discouraging child marriages and teenage pregnancy.”

Dr Mihayo explained that Uganda’s teenage pregnancies are the highest in the region at 25 per cent, which expose the child-mother to delivering premature babies, babies with birth weight of below 2.5kg, and high risk of developing high blood pressure.

Other risks associated with teenage pregnancies include failure to have normal delivery because the pelvic bones are not yet well developed, babies dying during birth while others come out when they are tired and die immediately after birth.
In some other cases the women can get fistula because of maternal complications.

“At least 25 per cent girls aged 15 to 19 are pregnant. 10 per cent of the sexually active adolescents aged 15 to 19 had their first sexual encounter before age 15 while 350,000 adolescents of 10 to 19 years seek and are served with maternal health services,” Dr Mihayo said.

The Director General of Health Services, Dr Henry Mwebesa, encouraged all pregnant women to go to health facilities for antenatal checkups at least eight times during the pregnancy to ensure they and their unborn babies are safe.
He said the challenge is that pregnant women go to health centres at the last minute, putting pressure on the health workers especially when they arrive with complications.

“We do not encourage children below 18 to receive family planning services. If you encourage them that you can come and have pills, injection, these young adolescents will think it is okay to sleep around. We encourage them to wait [to have sex] up to 18 years. We should not be the ones to encourage them to go around with their boyfriends because they can swallow a pill. In the process they can also get other complications even if they used condoms,” Dr Mwebesa added.

Dr Mihayo said people who get Human Papillomavirus (HPV) are in most cases those who start sex at an early age causing them to get cancer of the cervix. He said the ministry is encouraging immunisation of girls with the HPV vaccine to prevent cervical cancer.

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