Publication: Unleashing Aspirations While Ensuring Opportunities Could Help Reduce Teenage Pregnancy in Latin America and the Caribbean
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2024-06-27
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2024-06-27
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Teen pregnancies are common in Latin America and the Caribbean and pose risks for the mother and her future family. Though it has fallen, the region has the second highest teen pregnancy rate in the world (55 births per 1,000 girls aged 15-19), after Sub-Saharan Africa (World Bank 2023a). Teenage pregnancy poses risk of health complications and can lead to lower educational achievement and fewer job opportunities (Azevedo et al. 2012; The Economist 2019; World Bank 2023a).
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“World Bank. 2024. Unleashing Aspirations While Ensuring Opportunities Could Help Reduce Teenage Pregnancy in Latin America and the Caribbean. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/41793 License: CC BY-NC 3.0 IGO.”
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Publication Teenage Pregnancy and Opportunities in Latin America and the Caribbean : On Teenage Fertility Decisions, Poverty and Economic Achievement(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012)The pregnancy project sought to expose the existence, and challenge the validity, of stereotypes about Hispanic women. The charade explored the underlying motivations of the many who responded with a wide range of reactions. The specific objectives of this regional study are: to establish a thorough description of the magnitude of the issue and its potential implications for social advancement; to advance the understanding of the risk factors, motivations and impacts at the household level-as a determinant of poverty and a cause of intra-and intergenerational poverty traps; to illuminate the coping mechanisms and their individual and social implications; to highlight the gender-related issues that have historically provoked asymmetric costs to boys and girls; and to provide elements that support specific policies on this matter. In the last decade, Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) have been moving in the right direction and the region has experienced important gains in gender equality of endowments (assets) and economic opportunities. In most LAC countries, girls have been achieving gender parity in primary school enrollment and even outperforming boys at the secondary and tertiary level. The present report reviews the factors associated with teenage pregnancy and early childbearing and builds a framework to explore these issues systematically, towards the design of effective policy interventions in LAC. Teen pregnancy and early childbearing remain a challenge in the region, particularly given the association of these phenomena with poverty and lack of opportunities, and the concern that it may prevent women from taking full advantage of their human development assets and opportunities. The main message of the report is that poverty and lack of opportunities are key factors associated to early childbearing.Publication Do Our Children Have a Chance? A Human Opportunity Report for Latin America and the Caribbean(World Bank, 2012)This book reports on the status and evolution of human opportunity in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). It builds on the 2008 publication in several directions. 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At the current pace, it would take, on average, a generation for the region to achieve universal access to just the basic services that make for human opportunity. Seen from the viewpoint of equity, even our most successful nations lag far behind the developed world, and intracounty regional disparities are large and barely converging. Fortunately, there is much policy makers can do about it.Publication The Status of Yemini Women : From Aspiration to Opportunity(Washington, DC, 2014-02)The report draws on the conceptual framework of the world development 2012: gender equality and development, and the regional report on gender equality, opening doors: gender equality in the Middle East and North Africa. The report's analytic approach is unique in threading together three bodies of evidence and analysis to shed new light on significant trends and causes underpinning the large gender disparities in the country. The report presents: i) a fresh look at available survey data on human development and socio-economic indicators in the country; ii) a brief history and in-depth analysis of the most critical legal barriers to women's and girl's full participation in Yemeni society; and iii) insights from a rich qualitative dataset collected in January 2011.The findings especially highlight the powerful roles of social norms and legal rights and entitlements in placing women and girls at a disadvantage and constraining not only faster progress on gender equality but also the country's economic development. The objectives of this report are two-fold: first, to take stock of the status of gender outcomes in Yemen and understand the forces that are driving the strong gender inequalities; and second, drawing on these insights and outcomes of the study, to highlight promising areas for policy action in this crucial transition period. The report explores how individual aspirations and opportunities in the areas of education, family formation, and labor force participation are constrained by the severe gender gaps in Yemeni society.Publication Enhancing Youth Skills and Economic Opportunities to Reduce Teenage Pregnancy in Colombia(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-06-25)The Government of Colombia (GoC) has identified teenage pregnancy as a priority issue. The current strategic framework to address teenage pregnancy in Colombia is outlined in the CONPES 147, effective from February 2012 until March 2014. The CONPES 147 establishes a multi-sectoral framework that aims to address the determining factors of teenage pregnancy within Colombia (Box 1). The national strategy outlined in the CONPES 147 was piloted in 192 municipalities for youth ages 10 through 19. Building on this strategy, the Commission for the Guarantee of Sexual and Reproductive Rights is developing a new framework to guide the government’s policy and activities to address this important policy issue in the coming years. Parallel to its work on teenage pregnancy, the GoC released a national strategic framework to generate opportunities for Colombian youth in July 2014. The note includes an overview of the WDR 2012 gender equality framework and World Bank regional study on teenage pregnancy; outlines the Colombian country context with regard to gender equality and youth labor market outcomes; reviews interventions that develop life skills; and highlights how these interventions might be relevant to the GoC policies and programs related to teenage pregnancy prevention (CONPES 147) and youth labor (CONPES 173).Publication Measuring Inequality of Opportunities in Latin America and the Caribbean(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2009)Over the past decade, faster growth and smarter social policy have reversed the trend in Latin America's poverty. Too slowly and insufficiently, but undeniably, the percentage of Latinos who are poor has at long last begun to fall. This has shifted the political and policy debates from poverty toward inequality, something to be expected in a region that exhibits the world's most regressive distribution of development outcomes such as income, land ownership, and educational achievement. This book is a breakthrough in the measurement of human opportunity. It builds sophisticated formulas to answer a rather simple question: how much influence do personal circumstances have on the access that children get to the basic services that are necessary for a productive life? Needless to say, producing a methodology to measure human opportunity, and applying it across countries in one region, is just a first step. On the one hand, technical discussions and scientific vetting will continue, and refinements will surely follow. On the other, applying the new tool to a single country will allow for adjustments that make the findings much more useful to its policy realities. And fascinating comparative lessons could be learned by measuring human opportunity in developed countries across, say, the states of the United States or the nations of Europe. But the main message this book delivers remains a powerful one: it is possible to make equity a central purpose, if not the very definition, of development. That is, perhaps, it's most important contribution.
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