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PRIORITYMEASURE12
“Implement comprehensive, timely, good-quality sexual health and reproductive health programmes for adolescents and young people, including youth-friendly sexual
health and reproductive health services with a gender, human rights, intergenerational and intercultural perspective, which guarantee access to safe and effective
modern contraceptive methods, respecting the principles of confidentiality and privacy, to enable adolescents and young people to exercise their sexual rights and
reproductive rights, to have a responsible, pleasurable and healthy sex life, avoid early and unwanted pregnancies, the transmission of HIV and other sexually
transmitted infections, and to take free, informedand responsible decisions regarding their sexual and reproductive life and the exercise of their sexual orientation.”
Possible lines of action
1.
Adopt specific national legislation, with the appropriate regulations and protocols, to protect universal access for adolescents and
young people to sexual and reproductive health services; 2. Adopt specific national legislation to guarantee exercise of the sexual and
reproductive rights of adolescents and young people; 3. Create or strengthen adolescent health programmes, with an explicit component
of sexual and reproductive health, inministries and secretariats of health; 4. Guarantee regular budget funding as needed for sexual and
reproductive health services and programmes for adolescents and young people; 5. Establish the physical, institutional and operational
infrastructure for sexual and reproductive health services and programmes targeted especially at adolescents; 6. Institute health checkups
for healthy adolescents, including a sexual and reproductive health component; 7. Train specialists in sexual and reproductive health care
for adolescents and young people and in providing counselling on these issues for those groups; 8. Define and implement youth- and
adolescent- friendly protocols in all public and private health services; 9. Define and implement protocols for violence prevention,
detection and treatment, with an emphasis on sexual violence, in care for youngpeople.
Targets
1. Eliminate the barriers that obstruct or limit universal access for adolescents and young people to sexual and reproductive health
services; 2. Eliminate the barriers that obstruct or limit adolescents and young people in the exercise of their sexual and reproductive
rights; 3. Establish sexual and reproductive health programmes for adolescents and young people through the healthministry; 4. Provide
local sexual and reproductive health services with staff trained andmotivated to offer a service that is friendly to adolescents and young
people; 5.Meet the demand for contraception among adolescents and young people; 6. Reduce unplanned pregnancies among adolescent
girls andyoungwomen; 7. Reduce violence, particularly sexual violence, against adolescents andyoungpeople.
Tentative indicators
1.
Existence of a legal framework guaranteeing the exercise of sexual and reproductive rights for adolescents and young people,
including universal access to timely and high-quality comprehensive reproductive health services; 2. Number of health centres that offer
youth- and adolescent- friendly services and guarantee confidentiality and respect for sexual orientation and gender identity;
3. Percentage of adolescents and young peoplewhose demands for contraception aremet withmodernmethods; 4. Percentage ofwomen
aged 20-24yearswho had their first child before the age of 20years; 5. Percentage of births to adolescentmothers that are unplanned.
Related instruments,
forums andmechanisms
MDG 5B; SDG targets 3.7:
By 2030 ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive health care services, including for family
planning, information and education, and the integration of reproductive health into national strategies and programmes
; 5.6:
Ensure
universal access to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights as agreed in accordancewith the Programme of Action of the
ICPD and theBeijingPlatform for Action and the outcome documents of their review conferences
.
Comments
This Priority measure contains a number of qualifications that cannot be taken for granted (for example, that there should be
“comprehensive, timely, good-quality sexual health and reproductive health programmes for adolescents and young people, including
youth-friendly sexual health and reproductive health services with a gender, human rights, intergenerational and intercultural
perspective”), and that can be difficult to measure with existing sources and conventional methodologies. One possibility is to use
friendly services as benchmarks and quantify their care, or even rate their quality. Consequently, the sources used for monitoring must
take this complexity into account, as well as the technical details of indicators 2 and 3, which may look complex at first sight, but are
resolved for practical purposes by specialized surveys such as demographic and health surveys and international reproductive health
surveys. Given the high indices of social inequality in early pregnancy patterns and in adequate and timely contraceptive protection, the
indicatorsmust be brokendownby gender, socioeconomic, rural-urban and ethnic status, at least.
