Health and Wellbeing
Early pregnancy and childbearing significantly disadvantage girls, starting a cycle of social exclusion that significantly harm their and their offspring’s physical, mental, and social well-being. Despite the negative consequences of adolescent childbearing, there is limited evidence on the experiences of pregnant and parenting adolescents in Africa and appropriate interventions to enhance the health and well-being of these adolescents and their children. Taking a life course approach, the Health and Wellbeing Theme seeks to develop a transdisciplinary program of work that will generate rigorous evidence on the health and well-being of pregnant and parenting adolescents and their children.
The program will have three synergistic aims: 1) to generate evidence on the lived experiences of pregnant and parenting adolescents including their experiences accessing maternal and child health services, mental health and socio-economic impacts of adolescent pregnancies; 2) to design and evaluate multi-sector interventions to improve health and wellbeing outcomes for pregnant and parenting adolescents and their children; and 3) to strategically engage with policy actors to facilitate the uptake of the evidence generated to inform policies and programs.
The requested seed fund will support preliminary work, including desk reviews and secondary analysis of existing data within APHRC, and partnership and proposal development toward developing a multi-year, multi-country research program on improving the health and well-being of pregnant and parenting adolescents and their children.