Shah IH, Fachel LO, Bronfman M

Language: English
References: 2
Page: 8-9
PDF size: 126.13 Kb.

Text Extraction

With the global number of 1.2 billion adolescents aged 10-19 years and 1.8 billion young people aged 10-24 years in 2005, health and human rights advocates, researchers, policy makers, programme managers and national and international development specialists are becoming increasingly sensitive to the special needs of this large and critically important group. Yet, the observation made in the Programme of Action of the 1994 International Population Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) that "the reproductive health needs of adolescents as a group have been largely ignored to date by existing reproductive health services" still remains mostly applicable. The sexual and reproductive health needs of adolescents differ from those of adults and remain poorly understood and inadequately served in much of the developing world. This neglect has major implications, since reproductive and sexual behaviours formed in adolescence have far reaching consequences for the lives of young people as they develop, and later on. Their sexual and reproductive health also have implications for the societies they live in. Adolescence is a period of transition marked with biological, psychological and social changes. Adolescents in the contemporary world are undergoing such changes at a time when societies are themselves going through profound social and economic transformations.

REFERENCES

1. United Nations. World Population Prospects: The 2004 Revision, Volume II: Sex and Age Distribution of the World Population. 2005. New York: United Nations.

2. The World Bank. World report 2007: Development and the Next Generation. 2007. Washington DC: The World Bank.