Adolescent Pregnancy: An Assessment of a Rural Community in Plateau State, North Central Nigeria.

Abstract

Background: The incidence of adolescent pregnancy worldwide is on the increase and constitutes a major public health challenge.About 16 million women 15-19 years of age give birth each year and this account for 11% of all births worldwide with 95% occurring in middle and low income countries.Maternal mortality is about 2 times higher in girls aged 15-19 than for women aged 20-24 and five times higher in adolescents younger than 15 years. Hence, this study was conducted to assess the level of adolescent pregnancy, its perception and predictors in a rural community in Plateau state, North central Nigeria. Methodology: This was a cross sectional study conducted among 92 adolescent girls in a rural community using quantitative method of data collection. Epi info statistical software version 7.0 was used for data analysis. A 95% confidence interval was used in this study with a p-value of ? 0.05 was considered statistically significant. Results: The mean age of the adolescents was 16.6 1.8 years with most (73.9%) of them above 15 years of age. The overall level of adolescent pregnancy was 17.4% while pregnancy among those with a history of sexual experience was found to be 51.6%. Majority of the respondents perceived pregnancy in the adolescent period as inappropriate and shameful and schooling status of the adolescent was found to have positive statistically significant influence on adolescent pregnancy (OR = 0.1; 95% CI = 0.0153 0.6582; p = 0.017). Conclusion: This study has shown the level of pregnancy among adolescents in a rural setting with its corresponding perception and opined that structured interventions targeting the sexually and sexual needs of this group will go a long way in addressing this problem.