Young People's Sexual and Reproductive Health Interventions in Developing Countries: Making the Investments Count

Abstract

Considering the huge resources -- human and materials -- that are involved in intervention programs the findings in this supplement points to the need to pay greater attention to the quality of program design implementation and evaluation. This is crucial to ensuring that the huge investments made in adolescent and young people’s sexual health interventions in LMICs truly count. On the one hand greater emphasis on the use of evidence-informed approaches and designs underpinned by sound theoretical framework is clearly important. The results of the reviews published in this supplement aptly add to the available evidences on interventions that are effective in addressing specific young people’s SRH challenges in LMICs. On the other hand the case needs to be made strongly for the inclusion of rigorous evaluation approaches in every intervention program to enhance the potential for generating good evidence as well as facilitate opportunities to derive useful lessons for future interventions -- from both successful and nonsuccessful programs alike. Thus on the whole there is the need to ensure that interventions addressing adolescents and young people’s health issues are well grounded scientifically in terms of their design and complemented with effective implementation and rigorous evaluation and the successful projects taken to scale -- only then would the investments in adolescent and young people’s SRH interventions in LMICs truly count. (Excerpt) Copyright: 2016 Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine.