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Prioritizing the needs of adolescents by building the evidence base for life-saving impact of scaling up contraception and abortion for adolescents in Ethiopia, Malawi and Zambia using LiST

Tiziana Leone, LSE
Laura Sochas, London School of Economics
Tamara Fetters, Ipas
Ernestina Coast, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)

Systematic understanding of the life-saving impact of scaling up contraception and safe abortion interventions for adolescents is absent Using three country case studies-Ethiopia, Malawi, Zambia- the aim of this paper is to understand the health system costs and health outcomes of increased adolescent use of contraception and/or abortion-related care. We iteratively apply scenario building using the LiST tool to ascertain how different interventions in both contraception and post abortion care, as well as safe abortion services, might affect adolescents’ health outcomes, both from the perspective of health system costs and lives saved. The scenarios have been informed by key informant interviews [total n=8] in each of the countries to establish the quality of available data and the feasibility of future projections. The results show a clear impact of safe abortion interventions on the number of unsafe abortion, maternal and neonatal deaths with significant cost savings for the health system. The importance of this study is twofold: to increase awareness of the impact of sexual and reproductive health interventions for adolescents in low-resource settings; and, to demonstrate the novel use of LiST as a tool for impact measurement in the field of adolescent health.

Keywords: Children and youth, Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights, Family planning and contraception, Policy evaluation

See extended abstract.

  Presented in Session P9.