Preventing gender based violence and sexual and reproductive rights violations among adolescents to reduce teen pregnancy in Togo

Like most West African countries, despite many legal and institutional measures to protect adolescents, Togo has a very high teen pregnancy rate. This presents a great challenge for public authorities striving to fulfill their national and international commitments, in particular, the Sustainable Development Goals, which call for no one to be left behind.

In conjunction with this teen pregnancy phenomenon, existing studies show that adolescents in Togo face many challenges, including a significant inability to exercise their health, sexual, and reproductive rights and exposure to many instances of gender based violence. Solutions have certainly been proposed and implemented to address and prevent teen pregnancy in particular; however, these solutions have shown their limitations. Moreover, they have been developed using a non integrated, sectoral approach and do not do enough to put adolescents at the heart of finding solutions. In addition, these solutions do not adequately integrate interactions between teen pregnancy and gender based violence, which reflect gender inequalities and entrenched economic, social, and cultural norms, which limits their effectiveness.

This project seeks to produce an integrated alternative integrated model to combat teen pregnancy. For greater efficiency, this model, which will integrate interactions between gender based violence and adolescents' sexual and reproductive rights, should also propose a new collaborative and inter sectoral approach to identify and implement solutions for the teen pregnancy problem in Togo.

The project is expected to contribute to behavioural changes for adolescents, who will have access to integrated information and services to prevent teen pregnancy. The institutions and stakeholders involved in the prevention of teen pregnancy will be able to improve their modes of action and intervention by focusing on collaboration and by adopting a more inter sectoral approach. By taking a collaborative approach, the researchers involved will see their ability to develop and implement research that extends beyond their discipline.