Reaching Young People in Northern Nigeria















	Action Health Inc. 17 Lawal Street Jibowu, Lagos Tel. 01 774 3745 Fax. 01 342 5496

Reaching Young People in Northern Nigeria: Results of a Baseline Needs Assessment

Young people between ages 15-24 account for the majority of unwanted pregnancy, complication from unsafe abortions, and sexually transmitted infections in Nigeria. Unfortunately, because initiatives that provide sexual and reproductive health services to young people began to emerge only in the last decade, there is a dire lack of the skilled providers and youth-friendly facilities with the capacity to offer these services in Nigeria. The situation is much worse in northern Nigeria where hundreds of thousands of youth are exposed to higher levels of maternal mortality, forced to marry at lower ages, and have minimal access to modern family planning methods.

To complement our initial efforts to facilitate the establishment of youth-friendly health services in six states with the highest HIV/AIDS sero-prevalence rates in Nigeria, AHI initiated the Expanded Access to Sexual and Reproductive Health Services for Youth in Northern Nigeria Project in 2002 with support from The David and Lucile Packard Foundation. UNICEF supported the initial effort in 2000-2001 as part of the Nigeria HIV/AIDS Emergency Action Plan (HEAP).

The overall goal of this initiative is to develop interventions that will enable young people have greater access to sexual and reproductive health information and services in northern Nigeria. The project will utilize strategies and activities such as advocacy and social mobilization, capacity building and training, as well as collaboration and networking with partner organizations based in four northern Nigeria States (Kaduna, Nassarawa, Bauchi and Borno).

As part of the preliminary activities undertaken, AHI and its partner NGOs conducted a baseline needs assessment in the project states prior to commencing implementation activities. The publication, Programming for Youth Sexual and Reproductive Health in Northern Nigeria: Understanding Contexts and Challenges is a report of this needs assessment. It documents findings on a range of SRH issues among adolescents, their parents, community and opinion leaders, and other stakeholders who were interviewed for study. The report also makes use of secondary data from the 1999 Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey.

The needs assessment exercise helped to provide answers to questions, which were crucial in the design and implementation of the intervention programme. The findings show that adolescents obtain information about sexuality from a variety of sources, and engage in a wide range of practices and "do-it-yourself" procedures to maintain personal hygiene, prevent and treat STIs, and prevent and terminate unwanted pregnancies. The methods of termination of unwanted pregnancies involve the use of commodities such as washing blue, salt, potash and alum, and are learned from and passed on through peers. These methods are considered more confidential and are preferred to the services available in the community clinics. There are obvious implications for complications, morbidity, and mortality, all of which need to be redressed through intervention.

Evidence also indicates a widespread need for information and services tailored to the needs of the various categories of young people.

Specific recommendations from the study include:

The need for the provision of age-appropriate information about sexuality, as well as responsive sexual and reproductive health services, using a variety of strategies that take into consideration the sociocultural context of young people in the different communities.
The need to secure and equip youth centres, and train peer counselors, who, on a continuous basis, can engage in meetings and rallies, create awareness on SRH issues, help to build life skills, and point out the dangers of unprotected sexual intercourse.
Due to the prevailing religious and cultural norms within many communities in northern Nigeria, intensive advocacy, community mobilization, and education of the adult population would assist the project in overcoming the envisaged obstacles especially with sensitizing the communities on the importance of youth-serving organizations in promoting the sexual and reproductive well being of adolescents in those communities.