Fact sheet and brief
Family planning: the adolescent imperative
Millions of married adolescents girls give birth every year. The global response to family planning must put adolescent at its centre.
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16 million adolescent girls become mothers each year, and nearly all them live in developing countries and were married as children. With life-long consequences for girls and their children, child marriage and adolescent pregnancy are a challenge of international urgency.
This policy brief calls for four key actions to meet this challenge:
- More funding to match the scale of the challenge
- More efforts to challenge the norms that support child marriage
- More tailored strategies to curb child marriage and adolescent pregnancies across countries
- More data disaggregated by age to track our progress, and more comprehensive sex education to sustain our efforts