Motherhood in Childhood

Towards empowered adolescent
girls and fulfilled potential
Adolescents are shaping humanity’s present and
future. Depending on the opportunities and
choices they have during this period in life, they
can enter adulthood as empowered and active
citizens, or be neglected, voiceless and entrenched
in poverty.
When adolescent pregnancy occurs, it can
derail a girl’s healthy development and prevent
her from achieving her full potential and enjoying
her basic human rights. The impact can
reverberate throughout her life and carry over
to the next generation.
Experience from effective programmes shows
that what is needed is a transformative shift away
from narrowly focused interventions, targeted
at girls or at preventing pregnancy, and towards
broad-based approaches that build girls’ human
capital, focus on their agency to make decisions
about their lives (including matters of sexual and
reproductive health), and present real opportunities
for girls so that pregnancy is not seen as their
destiny. This new paradigm should instead target
the circumstances, conditions, norms, values
and structural forces that perpetuate adolescent
pregnancies on the one hand and that isolate and
marginalize pregnant girls on the other.
Interventions that have the power to reduce
vulnerability to early pregnancy, especially among
the poorest, least-educated and marginalized
girls, are those that are grounded in principles
of equity, equality and rights. Investments in
girls—in building their human capital and their
agency—can yield enormous social and economic
returns, to individuals, their families, communities
and nations.
Girls need access to sexual and reproductive
health services and information. They also need
to be unburdened from the economic and social
pressures that too often translate into a pregnancy
and the poverty, poor health and unrealized
human potential that come with it. Girls who
have become pregnant need support, not stigma.
Engagement by all stakeholders—families,
communities, schools, health care providers and
more—is essential to bring about change by
reshaping social norms, traditions and practices
that perpetuate adolescent pregnancy and compromise
girls’ futures. Cooperation among all
stakeholders can mobilize political will for investments
to empower adolescent girls and build
their agency.
s Youth peer
provider works
with local health
centres to reach
Ethiopian youth
and adolescents
with contraceptive
information and
supplies.
© Mark Tuschman/
Planned Parenthood
Global
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