This post reflects comments made by Dr. Elizabeth Hazel from the Monitoring for Action and Gender Equity (MAGE) project, a collaboration between the Global Financing Facility and Johns Hopkins University and Dr. Choolwe Jacobs from the University of Zambia during a webinar on 6 February 2025.

Learn more about the webinar and access the recording here.

Indicators from the Countdown RMNCAH profiles are an entryway into in-depth gender analysis, highlighting key needs and priorities for advancing the reproductive and maternal health of adolescent girls and young women. The latest country profile from Zambia illustrates this.

The country profile for Zambia shows that adolescent girls and young women face gendered barriers that affect their health and well-being. Child marriage is prevalent in Zambia: one third of girls are married before 18 years of age.  Child marriage puts girls at higher risk of poor health, violence, exploitation, and poverty, and is a human rights violation. Child marriage also contributes to school dropout rates and reduced educational engagement. Although overall secondary education completion is low, girls have a lower level of completion (27%) compared to boys (33%). The second leading cause of death for girls is interpersonal violence, signaling that abuse towards girls is a critical gender issue.

Gender norms can impact access to sexual and reproductive services and limit decision-making for adolescent girls and young women. Young girls and women, especially those not married, may experience barriers to accessing contraceptives.

Even some very young adolescents (10-14 years of age) are reproductively active, with 3 births per year per 1000 girls in this age group; thus, they require reproductive and maternal health services. However, the demand for family planning that is satisfied by modern contraceptives remains low across the country—only 56% of girls in need have access compared to 67% of women overall. Just 37% of females aged 15-19 years old reported informed decision-making about their sexual and reproductive health [1]. Examining the barriers young girls experience accessing maternal preventive care and contraceptives are critical gender issues.

These indicators provide valuable insight into the specific health challenges that adolescent girls and young women face in Zambia and helps to inform advocacy work and ensure accountability. In Zambia and other countries, this data can be used to target interventions for this key population and serve as an entryway for more in-depth analyses of how gender shapes RMNCAH-N outcomes.

This blog post was written by Hailey Spaeth. 

[1] Proportion of adolescent girls and young women aged 15-19 years (married or in union) who make their own decision on all three selected areas i.e. can say no to sexual intercourse with their husband or partner if they do not want; decide on use of contraception; and decide on their own health care.