Ogun State recorded 92,400 teenage pregnancies between 2016 and 2020, a survey by the Adolescents 360 (A360), a project within the purview of the Society for Family Health (SFH), has revealed.
Adolescent 360 is a four-year project funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Children Investment Foundation Fund and implemented by the Population Services International and the Society for Family Health in Nigeria.
The project is aimed at developing new and innovative approaches for designing programmes to improve the sexual and reproductive health of adolescent girls between ages 15 and 19 in Nigeria.
The Adolescents Sexual Reproductive Monitoring and Evaluation Coordinator of the A360 project, Adejumoke Oluwayinka, disclosed on Tuesday at an “agenda for adolescent dissemination” meeting in Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital, that between 2017 and 2020, the group reached out to 28,340 adolescent girls, out of which 18,776 adopted modern family planning methods.
Oluwayinka blamed the high rate of teenage pregnancy, abortion and sexually transmitted diseases among adolescents on poor government’s investment in youth health, education and empowerment.
According to her, the project was implemented in eight states – Kaduna, Nasarawa, Edo, Delta, Osun, Oyo, Ogun and Lagos – while its implementation took place in the two local government areas of Abeokuta South and Ado-Odo/Ota, Ogun State.
She disclosed that only few adolescents in the state had access to sexual and reproductive health services.
“Early sexual debut continues to persist, with 4.4 per cent boys and 5.3 per cent of girls having had sex by the age of 10,” she said.
Executive Secretary of the Ogun State Primary Healthcare Board, Dr Elijah Ogunsola, in his speech, noted that a lot of unwanted pregnancies had been salvaged through the project, just as some girls had been taken out of the streets through empowerment.
