Study: Only 10pc of Nairobi women use contraceptives
By George.Kebaso, August 24, 2022A visit to Mathare Valley in Nairobi and its environs on a sweltering Sunday afternoon demonstrates why only one in every 10 adolescents and young women in Nairobi are using contraceptives by the age of 18 as captured in a latest survey by Performance Monitoring for Action (PMA).
On the streets leading to the sprawling slum, a visitor is confronted by a picture of children of all ages everywhere, young jobless males in groups and their female counterparts at water-points, either fetching water or laundering linen.
Abbas, as he preferred to be called, is a leader of a group of boys whiling away time around the corner of one of the dingy streets. His response was shocking. “The girls here compete to be pregnant,” he cut into a conversation.
Another red-eyed teenager cut a brief silence. “We don’t have anything to do,” he said, indicating they just come to discuss their issues which includes finding a way to survive and enjoy the informal settlement’s other side of life; drinking and engaging in irresponsible sex.
These sentiments were confirmed by PMA — a consortium that generates studies monitoring key health indicators in nine countries in Africa and Asia.
“On the willingness between them (adolescents) and their partners to have sex, we found out that both were equally willing at 21.6 per while the respondents (girls) were more willing to have sex,” the report shows, further indicating that even the even the boys were willing at 62.4 per cent.
The Nairobi dissemination, Phase Three results released recently by the PMA, an arm of International Centre for Reproductive Health (ICRH), Kenya reflected that with just 10 out of 100 young women using contraceptives; it meant that 90 percent of them were exposed.
The survey paints a grim picture of the situation showing that for the adolescents who have had sex debut before the age of 18 years, 44.3 per cent were led by curiosity to know the experience, while 37.4 per cent were carried away, or lost self-control. “About three in every 10 adolescents were sexually experienced at the time of the survey though 95 per cent of the sexually experienced adolescents would have preferred to wait longer before they had first sex,” said Prof Peter Gichangi, the PMA principal investigator.
An estimated 15.1 per cent of the young women according to the survey were raped.
Adolescent girls
At the same time, 5 percent of the adolescents and young women in Nairobi are married by age 18. “One in every three adolescent girls and young women in Nairobi County have had first sex by age 18, which represents 33 per cent of the overall women population in the city,” Gichangi echoed the survey findings.
The survey shows that About 12 per cent of all adolescent girls are using modern contraceptives methods aged between 15-19 years while young women aged between 20-24 years stood at 45.6 per cent.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) describes females aged 10-24 years as Adolescent Girls and Young Women (AGYW).
About 10.6 per cent during that study said that they were doing what is expected of them whereas 8.6 per cent were under the influence of a substance like alcohol and marijuana. But when asked if they reflect back to their actions, if given chance to wait a little bit longer before having sex with anyone, 94.7 per cent said they would have waited longer whereas 5.3 per cent of the young women said they would not have waited for so long since it was the right time.
According to the PMA report, 47 per cent of them used male condoms during their first sex to prevent pregnancy, 31 per cent did not use any method, seven (7) per cent of them were using injectables, 4 per cent of them were on implants, and 4 per cent used the withdrawal method.
Birth control pills
“Whereas, most of these girls are not keen on condom use, we also just hear about them, and not many of us are accessible to these commodities,” Abbas noted, and called on the government to avail condoms in the slums.
According to the survey, another 4 per cent of them used the morning after pill to prevent pregnancy after having unprotected sex or a birth control mishap, while birth control pills are taken daily to prevent unplanned pregnancies, birth control pill at four per cent and emergency pills at 2 per cent. “About three in every 10 adolescents did not use a method during the last sex with five in every 10 of them using a male condom during the last sex. Only 6 in every 10 of the adolescents used contraceptive to prevent pregnancy the first time they had sex,” said Prof Gichangi.
He pointed out that the use of contraceptives among adolescents is much lower (12 per cent) than that of other women.
However, the Ministry of Health maintains that it’s illegal to offer family planning methods to children below 18 with severe consequences for culprits.