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Podcast: More support needed for Pacific girls and young women for unplanned pregnancies
Harnessing the potential of our Pacific region means including young women and girls. But how can this be done when one in six young women in the Pacific* has commenced childbearing?
“That’s a big number to worry about the implications of these unplanned pregnancies or these teenage pregnancies on our economies, on our productivity as a nation, and of course on our lived realities as a nation,” said SPC Principal Strategic Lead – Pacific Women and Girls, Mereseini Rakuita, speaking with ABC’s Sistas Let’s Talk about teenage unplanned pregnancies in the Pacific.
Ms Rakuita referred to the latest data on the prevalence of adolescent pregnancy in the region - as well as research findings that reflect the experiences of teenage mothers in some Pacific countries - as an indicator of the need for more support, given the limited services available.
To help increase services and support for adolescent girls and women in the Pacific, data and research play a critical role.
The Pacific Roadmap on Gender Statistics* aims to provide the guiding framework to support Pacific countries and their National Statistical Systems in generating quality, relevant and timely gender data to better understand gendered issues and advance gender equality.
Gender data from across Pacific countries is available on the Pacific Community’s (SPC) Pacific Data Hub Gender Dashboard. The Pacific Data Hub also houses a dashboard for the Pacific Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) indicator subset, collating data on the relevant SDG targets and indicators such as adolescent fertility rates (3.7.2).
Several civil society organisations are supported through the regional Pacific Girl programme, reaching more than 7,000 girls since 2019, and supporting research into unplanned pregnancies.
Considerably more support is needed, especially when girls drop out of school after falling pregnant.
Ms Rakuita highlights how family is critical to support adolescent girls and young women through an unplanned pregnancy.
“It’s very hard for a girl to get back into the education system if there is no support from home, and that in itself has a collateral effect on other factors of the economy, of productivity, of economic empowerment of these young girls, and the list goes on”.
In the ABC Sistas Let's Talk podcast and the online story, Ms Rakuita also shared her personal story about supporting her own daughter – Vasiti - through an unplanned pregnancy, including the journey through childbearing and on to university.
More information:
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Listen to the podcast (from 6:50minutes to hear Ms Rakuita): https://bit.ly/3TXPJGT
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Read the full online article featuring Ms Rakuita’s reflections here: https://ab.co/4afMrVe
Data sources:
- Pacific Roadmap on Gender Statistics https://data.unwomen.org/sites/default/files/documents/Publications/Pacific-Roadmap-Gender-Statistics.pdf
- Pacific Data Hub Gender Dashboard https://pacificdata.org/gender-dashboard
- Snapshot of Young People's Sexual and Reproductive Health in Asia and the Pacific, 2021 UNFPA, https://asiapacific.unfpa.org/en/publications/snapshot-young-peoples-sexual-and-reproductive-health-asia-and-pacific-0
