Montevideo, March 1, 2023. FP2030 organised a webinar with regional experts to exchange on the challenges and opportunities in sexual and reproductive health and family planning for young people and Afro-Latino indigenous peoples in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Rodolfo Gómez, regional advisor for Sexual and Reproductive Health at the Latin American Centre for Perinatology - Women's Health and Reproductive Health (CLAP/WR), gave a presentation on the strategies promoted by the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) to reduce unintended adolescent pregnancy in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Gómez said that adolescent pregnancy has an enormous impact on the trajectory of life and that it also has social and economic impacts. As an example, he pointed to the drop out of educational cycles.
He also explained that repeat pregnancies in adolescence are more frequent when the first pregnancy occurs at an earlier age.
The CLAP/WR expert stated that there is consensus among international organisations that the approach to this issue should be multisectoral. "There are aspects linked to legislative frameworks, aspects linked to gender and racial inequality, and it is also essential to have reliable data that allow us to approach solutions".
Gómez said that seven priority actions were established:
- Visibilisation of the problem.
- Design interventions that target the most vulnerable groups, ensuring that the approaches are adapted to their realities and address their specific challenges.
- Engage and empower young people to contribute to the design, implementation and monitoring of strategic interventions.
- Abandon ineffective interventions.
- Strengthen cross-sectoral collaboration.
- Move to large-scale, sustainable programmes.
- Create an enabling environment for gender equality, adolescent sexual and reproductive health and rights.
The advisor then referred to the inequities that exist in access to contraceptive methods, according to location and income quintile, and referred to the recent publication of the article "The role of gender inequality and health expenditure on the coverage of demand for family planning satisfied by modern contraceptives: a multilevel analysis of cross-sectional studies in 14 LAC countries", in Lancet for the Americas.
In this context, PAHO, through CLAP/WR, has developed a series of courses on Family Planning and Post Obstetric Event Contraception, which are free of charge and available on PAHO's virtual campus, and whose objective is to respond to an identified training need.
In conclusion, Gómez stressed that "training, availability of long-acting contraceptives and an enabling environment are the key elements in reducing adolescent pregnancy.
