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Browse POLICY Project (1995-2006) Materials

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Adolescent Reproductive Health

  • Owing to the high fertility and declining mortality experiences in the past, Kenya is characterized by a youthful population with over 40 per cent being younger than 15 years. This implies that over half of Kenyas population, about 31 million in 2004 is aged below 24 years, with a large peoportion being adolescents. Consequently, Kenya faces the formidible challenge of providing its adolescents with opportunities for a safe, healthy, and economically productive future. In line with the ICPD recommendations, Kenya has put in place an Adolescent Reproductive Health and Development (ARH&D) Policy to enhance the implementation and coordination of programmes that address the reproductive health and development needs of young people in the country. The principles spelt out in the ARH&D Policy provided a conceptual guide to the development of this Plan of Action, which further distinguishes four strategic areas: advocacy; health awareness and behaviour change communication; access to and utilization of sustainable youth friendly services; and management. This Plan of Action also provides an estimation of the total resources required to achieve the goal and objectives outlined in the Adolescent Reproductive Health and Development Policy.
    English
    KEN_ARH_POA 2005-15.pdf

  • English
    ARH_Bangladesh.pdf

  • English
    ARH_Cambodia.pdf

  • English
    ARH_Egypt.pdf

  • English
    ARH_India.pdf

  • English
    ARH_Indonesia.pdf

  • English
    ARH_Jordan.pdf

  • English
    ARH_Morocco.pdf

  • English
    ARH_Nepal.pdf

  • English
    ARH_Pakistan.pdf

  • English
    ARH_Philippines.pdf

  • English
    ARH_Sri_Lanka.pdf

  • English
    ARH_Vietnam.pdf

  • English
    ARH_Yemen.pdf

  • The POLICY Project conducted assessments of adolescent and youth reproductive health in 13 countries in the Asia and Near East (ANE) region that represent diverse population sizes and geographical, cultural, and socioeconomic settings. The countries included Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and Yemen in the Near East; Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka in South Asia; and Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam in Southeast Asia. In 2000, there were 354 million young people ages 15–24 in these 13 countries combined. The purpose of the assessments was to highlight the reproductive health status of adolescents and youth in each country within the context of the lives of young males and females.
    English
    arh.cfm

  • The National Centre for Youth Development (NCYD) created the Jamaica Youth Programmatic Inventory (YPI) as a database of active youth-serving organizations. The goal of the NCYD in collecting this information is to facilitate a national process of coordination and planning across sectors in an attempt to identify where gaps may exist in the array of programmes existing to address young people’s needs. The data was collected and analysed at two distinct levels: the organizational level, and the level of programmes directed at young people. 141 organizations are included in the YPI database encompassing 451 programmes in 358 locations serving hundreds of thousands of young people in every parish on the island.
    English
    JAM_YPI.pdf

  • This study tests the hypothesis suggested by many smaller studies that young people prefer to use private providers to access contraceptive methods. It examines the patterns in young women’s levels of sexual activity, use of modern methods of contraception, and sources of modern contraception by age group and union status, using Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data. In addition, while controlling for other important explanatory variables, the study seeks to answer the question of whether young women are more likely to choose private sector providers than older women. Results indicate that young women ages 15–24 have higher levels of sexual experience in Africa than in the Latin American, Caribbean, or Asian countries included in this analysis. Overall proportions of young women currently using modern contraceptive methods in Africa, however, are quite low when compared with countries included in the analysis from the Latin American, Caribbean, and Asian regions. Data examining whether young women are more likely than older women to choose private sector providers—while controlling for important explanatory variables—reveal mixed results. In Africa, data for most countries indicate that young women are significantly more likely to choose private and commercial sector providers. In two of the four countries examined in Asia, young women were significantly more likely to choose the private sector. Only in the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries were young women generally less likely to choose private and commercial sector providers than older women.
    English
    contraception_sources.pdf

  • This report documents the significance and impact of the first three core packages implemented in Romania, Ukraine, and Nigeria. It also presents key highlights of results achieved through the packages.
    English
    Synthesis_core_packages(final).doc

  • Parent-Youth Relationships: Implications for Youth Reproductive Health Policies and Programs
    English
    Haiti_Brief_1.pdf

  • Integrating Voluntary Counseling and Testing into a Reproductive Health Program for Young People
    English
    Haiti_Brief_2.pdf

  • This paper documents the achievements of the Edo State YAARH core package, which was implemented over the period from August 2001 through March 2004. Section II presents the context, policy issues, and stakeholders affecting the successful implementation of YAARH policies and programs in Edo State. Sections III and IV focus on the interventions and results achieved under the package, and Section V discusses the legacy of the project. In summary, this paper documents a pilot effort to facilitate a participatory networking, strategic planning, capacity building and advocacy process, resulting in a strengthened role for civil society in policy processes; the development, adoption, and funding of an evidence-based state-level YAARH strategy; and an improved enabling environment for the implementation of national YAARH policies and strategies at the state level.
    English
    Nigeria_CP_final_report.pdf

  • Nigeria is in the early stages of carrying out its new national policy on sexuality and reproductive health education. Worldwide, school-based programs are an important element of efforts to improve the reproductive health of young people. This paper reviews the international experience and its implications for Nigeria.
    English
    wps-12.pdf

  • This four-page policy brief describes efforts in Jamaica to strengthen multisectoral coordination on youth issues.
    English
    Jam_YRH.pdf

  • This four-page policy brief describes advocacy efforts that led to formulation of a state-level strategic plan for youth RH issues in Edo State, Nigeria.
    English
    Nig_YRH.pdf

  • At the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo, more than 180 countries, including 38 sub–Saharan African countries, drafted and ratified the Programme of Action that includes support for the provision of sexual and reproductive health education, information, and services to adolescents. Addressing adolescent reproductive health (ARH) issues is particularly crucial in sub–Saharan Africa, where rates of maternal mortality, unsafe abortion, and sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), among youth are the highest in the world. Despite the obvious importance of the topic, ARH remains a controversial subject in the sub–Saharan region. Consequently, the exercise of caution in approaching the subject has led to a gap between the declarations of governmental officials and the actual design of reproductive health policies and programs geared toward youth. This paper provides a practical means of assessing reproductive health policies and programs geared toward adolescents. First, it presents major elements of ARH policy and program development and sets benchmarks against which future policy and program development can be measured. Second, the paper compares ARH policy and program development in three Francophone African countries: Burkina Faso, Cameroon, and Togo.
    English
    wps-08.pdf

  • The POLICY Project conducted assessments of adolescent and youth reproductive health in 13 countries in the Asia and Near East (ANE) region that represent diverse population sizes and geographic, cultural, and socioeconomic settings. The countries include Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and Yemen in the Near East; Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka in South Asia; and Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam in Southeast Asia. In 2000, the 13 countries accounted for a total of 354 million young people ages 15 to 24 years. The purpose of the assessments was to highlight the reproductive health status of adolescents and youth in each country within the context of the lives of young males and females.
    English
    op-09.pdf

  • This brief reviews the main public sector adolescent reproductive health (ARH) programs in Buenos Aires, Argentina; Sao Paulo, Brazil; and Mexico D.F., Mexico, examining characteristics of ARH service facilities, factors that facilitate providers’ work, and users’ perspectives. The study provides important lessons for other countries interested in designing programs that ensure good adolescent reproductive health. It suggests that young people will respond to holistic health care and seek services where they are treated with respect and recommends providing specialized services to adolescents as part of all reproductive health programs.
    English
    pm-07.pdf

  • This document presents a summary of the global OVC situation and identifies policy-level gaps in national responses to the growing crisis. Importantly, the report proposes a country-level OVC "policy package" and offers recommendations to guide future policy dialogue and action. Adopting laws that protect the rights of all children, encouraging multisectoral collaboration, placing a special emphasis on educational opportunities, and establishing systems to identify the most vulnerable children are all crucial aspects of a comprehensive OVC policy response.
    English
    OVC_Policies.pdf

  • Draft National Youth and Adolescent Health Policy
    French
    PoliJeunes.pdf

  • This document presents a summary of the global OVC situation and identifies policy-level gaps in national responses to the growing crisis. Importantly, the report proposes a country-level OVC "policy package" and offers recommendations to guide future policy dialogue and action. Adopting laws that protect the rights of all children, encouraging multisectoral collaboration, placing a special emphasis on educational opportunities, and establishing systems to identify the most vulnerable children are all crucial aspects of a comprehensive OVC policy response.
    French
    OVC_PoliciesFr.pdf

  • The National Centre for Youth Development (NCYD) commissioned this situation assessment as part of its mandate to provide intersectoral coordination among various government and nongovernmental agencies to fulfil youth development objectives. Its purpose is to set a baseline for assessing the current level of youth development, highlight vital social and environmental factors which affect youths’ needs and abilities, track risk trends, and monitor positive advances in youth development. As a companion piece to this assessment, a Youth Programmatic Inventory gives the NCYD and other agencies an up-to-date accounting of active youth-serving organizations in Jamaica. It is hoped that these documents will help the NCYD and its partners to identify gaps in national coverage of youth development issues and priority areas of youth development. The situation assessment analyzes the status of youth in Jamaica using a set of roughly 70 quantitative indicators, drawn from the best sources available in Jamaica and elsewhere. For purposes of this document, youth are defined as between 10 and 24 years, unless otherwise indicated. The report presents data for the entire age range, or for subgroup of this range, where appropriate or where the data allows. Information is presented on trends and separate analyses are done by sex. Moreover, the analysis attempts to place findings on Jamaican youth within the national and regional context.
    English
    JAM_sitassess.pdf

  • Several published information indicates that Edo State has high rates of international sex trafficking, unplanned and unsafe abortion, female genital cutting and sexually transmitted diseases including HIV/AIDS among youth. These problems have been widely discussed in the popular press, and there is a growing body of public opinion indicating that Edo State has critical reproductive health problems among young people that need to be urgently addressed. Consequently, it was considered necessary to develop a strategic plan for improving the sexual and reproductive health of young adults and adolescents in Edo State and to address the peculiar YAARH problems in the state. We believe that such a plan would engender common understanding of the real needs of adolescents and young adults by relevant stakeholders in Edo State, thereby generating considerable impetus and resources for addressing the problems.
    English
    NIG_ARH_StratPlan.pdf

  • To begin to protect young men and young women from this heightened risk of HIV/AIDS, it is important that policymakers and program managers gain a better understanding of transactional sex among youth. Policymakers and program managers need answers to questions such as: Are youth at higher risk of engaging in transactional sex than other groups? What factors influence youth to engage in transactional sex? And, what subgroups of youth are particularly vulnerable to engaging in transactional sex? This study seeks to answer these questions by exploring whether adolescent boys and girls are at higher risk for engaging in transactional sex than older men and women by analyzing data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) from 12 sub-Saharan African countries including Benin, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic (CAR), Chad, Guinea, Kenya, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Togo, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. We also examine the relationship between young men and young women’s individual socio-demographic characteristics and the probability that they will engage in the exchange of sex for money.
    English
    Trans_Sex.pdf

  • Prior to 2002, two rounds of the PES had been fielded in Jamaica, the first in 1999 and the second in 2000. These rounds were conducted by the POLICY Project on behalf of USAID/Kingston (McClure et al., 2000; Strachan et al., 2001). Those rounds of the PES included four components of reproductive health, namely family planning, safe pregnancy, STDs/AIDS, and adolescents. This 2002 round of the PES, conducted jointly by Youth.now and the POLICY Project, focuses exclusively on adolescents. Called the Expanded ARH PES, the 2002 round included the same questions regarding adolescent reproductive health (ARH) that were used in 2000 and 1999 (hereafter referred to as the “original” ARH PES) and also included a number of additional questions to more accurately reflect the policy environment for ARH in Jamaica in 2002, given policy and program activities undertaken over the past few years (hereafter referred to as the “expanded” ARH PES). The 2002 Expanded ARH PES included the seven components of political support, policy formulation, organizational structure, legal and regulatory, program resources, program components, and evaluation and research. To measure change in the policy environment, respondents were asked to rate each item twice—once to reflect the current status in 2002, as well as once to indicate the status one year earlier in 2001.
    English
    JAM_PES2003.pdf

  • English
    JamPESRpt_rev_.PDF

  • Jamaican youth are key agents for social change, economic development, and technological innovation and are a major human resource for development. Youth ages 10 to 24 are also an important demographic group, comprising almost one-third of the population in the year 2000. To better understand and address the challenges youth in Jamaica face, the National Centre for Youth Development (NCYD) recently commissioned two studies, Situation Assessment Report, Youth in Jamaica, 2001 and Adolescent and Youth-Serving Organisations in Jamaica: Results from the Youth Programmatic Inventory (YPI) Survey. This document synthesizes information from the two studies to help in identifying important gaps and overlaps in the coverage of youth services, to inform the current review of the National Youth Policy, and to aid in the development of a strategic plan for implementing the national policy.
    English
    JAM_YJ.pdf

  • Recent news, events, and current policymaking efforts within the field of youth reproductive health.
    English
    Youth-policyNews(Jan05).pdf

  • Recent news, events, and current policymaking efforts within the field of youth reproductive health.
    English
    Youth-policyNews(Apr05).pdf

  • Recent news, events, and current policymaking efforts within the field of youth reproductive health.
    English
    youth-policy Newsletter Peru (color) final.pdf

  • An evaluation of the full first year of operation of the youth-policy.com website.
    English
    yp_monitoring_2005.pdf