UNICEF Report: A continuum of care for adolescent girls in South Asia: defining the issues, synthesizing evidence, and working towards a policy agenda
Publisher: UNICEF Regional Office for South Asia
Publication date: April 2011
APRIL 2011 - This paper attempts to offer a foundation for government and development partners to begin routinely monitoring the conditions of adolescent girls and developing adolescent-friendly health policies in South Asia.
Specifically, it will a) outline a holistic “continuum of care” for adolescent girls, based on a set of routinely-collected indicators pertaining to health, protection, education and sanitation, b) synthesize data from a number of new major South Asia datasets (DHS and MICS) to present this continuum of care graphically and conceptually, in order to assess coverage and equity issues, and c) analyze new evidence on South Asia health systems “bottlenecks” from an adolescent’s perspective to identify opportunities to better reach them with high-impact, evidence-based interventions. The paper will conclude by suggesting a number of principles to guide regional policy dialogue on adolescent girls’ health.