Family planning: the adolescent imperative

16 million adolescent girls become mothers each year, and nearly all them live in developing countries and were married as children. With life-long consequences for girls and their children, child marriage and adolescent pregnancy are a challenge of international urgency.

This policy brief calls for four key actions to meet this challenge:

• More funding to match the scale of the challenge


• More efforts to challenge the norms that support child marriage


• More tailored strategies to curb child marriage and adolescent pregnancies across countries


• More data disaggregated by age to track our progress, and more comprehensive sex education to sustain our efforts