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The purpose of this indicator is to find out the number of births to adolescent females in an effort to improve maternal health and reduce infant mortality by seeking the reduce that number.

Annual number of births to females aged 10-14 or 15-19 years per 1,000 females in the respective age group

Ministry of Health (MOH)

Ministry of Health (MOH)

Annual

Ratio

Reducing adolescent fertility and addressing the multiple factors underlying it are essential for improving sexual and reproductive health and the social and economic well-being of adolescents. There is substantial agreement in the literature that women who become pregnant and give birth very early in their reproductive lives are subject to higher risks of complications or death during pregnancy and birth than their peers, and their children are also at greater risk of morbidity and death than children born to older women. Therefore, preventing births very early in a woman’s life is an important measure to improve maternal health and reduce infant mortality.

The adolescent birth rate represents the risk of childbearing among females in a particular age group. The adolescent birth rate (ABR) is also referred to as the age-specific fertility rate (ASFR) for ages 15-19 years, a designation commonly used in the context of calculation of total fertility estimates. A related measure is the proportion of adolescent fertility, measured as the percentage of total fertility contributed by women aged 15- 19.

This indicator is dis-aggregated is by age, education, number of living children, marital status, socioeconomic status, geographic location and other categories, depending on the data source and number of observations.

• The adolescent birth rate is computed as a ratio. This indicator is calculated using the following formula:

SDG 3.7.2 = (Number of live births to women aged 15-19 years) /(Estimate of the exposure to childbearing by women aged 15-19 years) The computation is the same for the age group 10-14 years.

• The numerator and the denominator are calculated differently for civil registration, survey and census data. In the case of civil registration data,

SDG 3.7.2 = (Number of live births born to women aged 15- 19 years during a given year) /(Estimated or enumerated population of women aged 15- 19 years)

• In the case of survey data,

SDG 3.7.2 = (Number of live births obtained from retrospective birth histories of the interviewed women who were 15-19 years of age at the time of the births during a reference period before the interview)/ (Person-years lived between the ages of 15 and 19 years by the interviewed women during the same reference period)

The reported observation year corresponds to the middle of the reference period. For some surveys without data on retrospective birth histories, computation of the adolescent birth rate is based on the date of last birth or the number of births in the 12 months preceding the survey. With census data, the adolescent birth rate is computed on the basis of the date of last birth or the number of births in the 12 months preceding the enumeration. The census provides both the numerator and the denominator for the rates. In some cases, the rates based on censuses are adjusted for under-registration based on indirect methods of estimation.

This indicator is of particular interest with adolescent reproductive health interventions designed to reduce unintended pregnancy.

For survey and census data, both the numerator and denominator come from the same population. The main limitations concern age misreporting, birth omissions, misreporting the date of birth of the child, and sampling variability in the case of surveys.

All the metadata shown in this document was gathered from United Nation Statistics Division. The metadata was extracted from https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/metadata/.