WORLD JOURNAL OF ADVANCE
HEALTHCARE RESEARCH

Mark Lule, Samuel Apire, Edgar Twinomujuni, Andrew Tumuhameho and Geoffrey Babughirana*

ABSTRACT

Adolescents are characterized by rapid physical, psychological and social changes and yet they lack the skill to cope with the changes that could result into risky adventures hence a burden of disease. The Ugandan government has adopted policies that create an environment supportive of reproductive and sexual health to improve adolescents’ health. At the onset of the project, it was estimated that unwanted teenage pregnancies in Uganda were at 25% of all pregnancies. Only 17% of sexually active adolescents and youth used contraception[11] and the biggest contributor is inadequate health education for youth in and out of school. The main aim of the study was to determine the effect of adolescent health interventions in Kitgum district to ascertain the gaps in adolescent sexual health, and make recommendations for future programming. This was through a two-stage pre-post test quasi-experimental comparison study that was carried out with a strategy assessing adolescent behavioral outcomes after exposing them to sexual education interventions. Results indicate that there was a 5.9% increase in pupils joining relationships in school, a 6.2% reduction in the number of pupils practicing sexual intercourse. In addition, 85.5% of all sexual engagements happened with someone not in a relationship with. There was a 20% reduction in condom use among the youth in just a year of implementation with the majority using the condoms in a relation at the endline (66.7%). Delay at age of sexual practice also showed significant improvement. At the baseline 51.9% of the pupils who had a recent encounter were between the 13 to 15 year age category, with 40.7% of the pupils in the 16 to 18 years age category. At the evaluation stage, there was a major shift in the age categorisation. 70.6% of the pupils who had had the most recent encounter were from a more mature age category of 16 to 18 years and a drastic drop in the 13 to 15 age category to 29.4%. Key recommendations include: focusing on Commodity and information availability, Capacity building of Senior Teachers, Utilization of Youth Structures, Acceleration of national Level Advocacy for sexual and sexuality implementation in Schools and District replication of interventions somewhere else.

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