Malawi’s Teenage Pregnancy Rate Hits 32 Percent As Advocates Call for Stronger Sexual Health Investment

Two Malawian organisations have joined forces to lobby for increased investment in adolescent sexual and reproductive health rights, warning that teenage pregnancy rates in the country continue to rise despite years of intervention.

The Centre for Social Research (CSR) and Women for Sustainable Agile Development in Malawi (WOSAD) set out their case at a one-day workshop on adolescent and sexual reproductive health rights reporting, held in Lilongwe on Wednesday.

Speaking to Nyasa Times afterwards, Witness Alfonso, a research fellow at CSR, University of Malawi, said greater access to comprehensive sexuality information was essential in helping adolescent girls understand how to prevent early pregnancy.

He said poverty remained one of the principal drivers of teenage pregnancy in Malawi, and called on government and other stakeholders to address it directly.

“It’s very important for government and other stakeholders to seriously look at these drivers because they are very important and if we manage them we can do a very good job in trying to reduce the cases of teenage pregnancies in Malawi,” he said.

Alfonso noted that, despite ongoing efforts to curb the problem, prevalence rates had in fact worsened over the past decade, rising from 29% in 2016 to 32% currently.

Judith Pangani, executive director at WOSAD, said her organisation had been running a range of interventions since 2021 aimed at tackling teenage pregnancy and child marriage, while advocating for stronger implementation of laws and policies on adolescent sexual and reproductive health education and gender equality.

“We have had some capacity building that we conducted targeting service providers, young people themselves to make sure they know where they can exactly access the services, and also we have been providing information through digital platforms and radios as well.

“The idea was to amplify ASRHR information to the public, including the target group themselves,” Pangani said.

CSR and WOSAD have worked in partnership since 2022, with support from the African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC), a Nairobi-headquartered, Africa-led research institution that generates evidence to inform policy on health, education and population dynamics.

By Nyasa Times.