Government asked to allow girls to access family planning information
According to the Uganda Demographic Health Survey 2016 (UDHS 2016), four in every 100 teenage girls are either pregnant or have had their first child. FILE PHOTO
What you need to know:
- A 2016 study on the linkage between pregnancy and school dropouts in Uganda, carried out by MoES and Forum for Women Educationalists Uganda, found that among sexually active girls, 36 per cent (29 per cent in primary and 50 per cent in secondary school) have used contraceptives. Over two thirds of sexually active girls in primary school got pregnant.
Ugandan government has been tasked to acknowledge the problem of teenage pregnancies that is affecting most parts of the country and allow girls to freely and openly access family planning information to help them make better decisions later in life.
According to the Uganda Demographic Health Survey 2016 (UDHS 2016), four in every 100 teenage girls are either pregnant or have had their first child.
“We know that people are starting to have sex at the age of nine or twelve. The reproductive health education needs to happen. People are doing it secretly. It is actually happening and most of them (girls) are getting wrong information on contraceptives,” Ms Kullein Ankunda, the Communications and External Relations Officer at Jhpiego told Daily Monitor on Tuesday.
Jhpiego in partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health aims to accelerate adoption and scaling up of proven high impact family planning interventions so that parents are able to produce children that they are able to take care of and give a better life.
“We have allowances for teenagers to come and get the knowledge even if they are not coming to get the actual contraception or family planning. At least let them have the knowledge so that when the time comes and they are involved in sex or when they want to have sex, they have the knowledge,” Ms Ankunda said.
She added: “We are spreading that knowledge in a preventive way. So spread it before as op-posed to after pregnancy.”
Ms Ankunda insists that the myths around contraceptives causing cancer and other diseases can only be overcome through sensitisation because the more someone knows, the more they are able to make informed decisions.
Ms Beatrice Bainomugisha, the programme coordinator at The Challenge Initiative, a project that aims at scaling up family planning among the urban poor in 14 districts in Uganda, said teenage pregnancy is an economic burden to the economy. She said children who are supposed to be in school to study to become better citizens to the country have their lives disrupted and cannot meaningfully contribute to development.
“It would be very good to have contraceptives openly discussed in schools especially with those teens who have reached reproductive age. They are at risk of getting pregnancies. At school, these children have poor influences from their friends who tell them wrong information about reproductive health. It would be okay to teach them who to consult and go to if they are faced with a reproductive health challenge,” she said.
In 2018, government launched the National Sexuality Education framework to provide a formal, national direction for sex education within Uganda’s schools. However, this was widely negatively criticised by parents, teachers and religious leaders.
A 2016 study on the linkage between pregnancy and school dropouts in Uganda, carried out by MoES and Forum for Women Educationalists Uganda, found that among sexually active girls, 36 per cent (29 per cent in primary and 50 per cent in secondary school) have used contraceptives. Over two thirds of sexually active girls in primary school got pregnant.
