The Ugandan government has been tasked to acknowledge the problem of teenage pregnancies that is affecting most parts of the country and allow girls to freely and openly access family planning information to help them make better decisions later in life.

According to the Uganda Demographic Health Survey 2016 (UDHS 2016), four in every 100 teenage girls are either pregnant or have had their first child.

“We know that people are starting to have sex at the age of nine or twelve. Reproductive health education needs to happen. People are doing it secretly. It is actually happening and most of them (girls) are getting wrong information on contraceptives,” Ms Kullein Ankunda, the Communications and External Relations Officer at Jhpiego told Daily Monitor on Tuesday.

Jhpiego in partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health aims to accelerate adoption and scaling up of proven high impact family planning interventions so that parents are able to produce children that they are able to take care of and give a better life.

“We have allowances for teenagers to come and get the knowledge even if they are not coming to get the actual contraception or family planning. At least let them have the knowledge so that when the time comes and they are involved in sex or when they want to have sex, they have the knowledge,” Ms Ankunda said.

She added: “We are spreading that knowledge in a preventive way. So spread it before as op-posed to after pregnancy.”