The National Secretariat for the Reduction of Teenage Pregnancy over the weekend organised a one day orientation session for District Health Management Teams and hospitals on data collection.
With support from the United Nations Fund for Population Issues (UNFPA) the session which was held at the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) Brookfields, was to empower monitoring and evaluation officers on new methods of how best to collect accurate and correct data for input into the health management information system (HMIS).
The health M&E officers from the various DHMTs were very enthusiastic to listen and learn from what the facilitators had to say with regards to the full implementation of the issues discussed, reporting template participants will use, to be knowledgeable in the Monitoring and evaluation strategy for the reduction of teenage pregnancy, data collection tool, provision of enough logistics for field data collection and to know the missing information from the health management information systems.
Programme Manager for the reduction of teenage pregnancy in the country, Sister Rugiatu Kanu during her formal opening courtesies, stated that globally it is estimated that 14 million adolescents between the age of 15 and 19 give birth.
She said others uncounted for are even younger when they have babies, but on the average, one third of young women in developing countries give birth before age 20, according to UNFPA 2012 report.
Sister Kanu revealed that a World Health Organisation (WHO) 2010 regional report states that adolescent childbearing is most prevalent in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Also statistics, she said, shows that 34% of all pregnancies occur amongst teenage girls, 26% of women age 15-19 have already had a birth, 40% of maternal death occur as a result of teenage pregnancy, and only 8% of teenage mothers report that their first partner was of the same age or younger, indicate that the partner was more than 10 year older.
These percentages, she noted, are alarming and Government and its partners need to act fast to put programmes in place that will provide adolescence access to family planning in a friendly environment centre.
Sister Kanu maintained that this can be achievable through a proper and correct data collection at all levels around the country, but resources are scarce for enough logistics for field data collection which was the main issue during the orientation session.
Some of the field officers admitted that they have no challenge in using the new system provided by the ministry of health, the challenge is with the availability of the internet in a particular locality.
The Programme Manager confessed that data collection is a big challenge, especially in the northern region, but appealed to participants to use the limited resources to compile available data.
Data collectors suggested that the secretariat needs to organise orientation session at chiefdom level to further teach Peripheral Health Units (PHUs) the methodology that will make data collection less complicating.
It is only few more weeks to end 2015 and if there is no proper data available for the whole year, Government and its partners will find it very difficult to plan and develop programmes to target adolescents and reduce teenage pregnancy, especially in rural communities.
By Ade Campbell
Tuesday November 17, 2015
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