“Worse than the War”: An Ethnographic Study of the Impact of the Ebola Crisis on Life, Sex, Teenage Pregnancy, and a Community-Driven Intervention in Rural Sierra Leone
“Worse than the War”: An Ethnographic Study of the Impact of the Ebola Crisis on Life, Sex, Teenage Pregnancy, and a Community-Driven Intervention in Rural Sierra Leone
The purpose of this research, undertaken by the Inter-Agency Learning Initiative on Community-Based Child Protection Mechanisms and Child 
Protection Systems, is to illuminate both the wider impacts of the Ebola crisis on people’s lived experiences, with an emphasis on children, and its more specific effects on issues related to teenage pregnancy and its prevention. The key findings are presented in three sections: general effects of the Ebola crisis, effects on teenage pregnancy and related issues, and effects on the community-driven intervention. Four key recommendations grew out of this research, which include strengthening the training and monitoring of emergency workers, improving the alignment between community practices and those recommended by Westernized health systems, building emergency preparedness and response and disaster risk reduction into community-driven interventions, and re-prioritizing the prevention of teenage pregnancy in Sierra Leone, building social protection into prevention efforts.
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A Community-Driven Intervention to Reduce Teenage Pregnancy in Two Districts in Sierra Leone
Starting in 2012, the Inter-Agency Learning Initiative on Strengthening Community-Based Child Protection Mechanisms and Child Protection Systems established a community-owned and driven intervention to reduce teenage pregnancy in the Moyamba and Bombali Districts in Sierra Leone. Two clusters of three intervention communities elected to address the problem of teenage pregnancy through a mixture of family planning, sexual and reproductive health education, and life skills. This action research uses a quasi-experimental design to test the effectiveness of this intervention in reducing teenage pregnancy. A year after community members received trainings, a participatory evaluation workshop was held to learn community perspectives on what happened in the first full year of the intervention implementation. Findings reveal that across all three communities, a major reduction in teenage pregnancies had occurred. In addition, greater supportive linkages between the communities and the formal health system were established. Overall, while the findings are not final, they suggest the intervention is on its way to achieving intermediate results that will ultimately help reduce teenage pregnancy and contribute to the evidence base on community-based child protection programming.
Webinar:
Change that Counts: Results from a Community Driven Intervention to Reduce Teenage Pregnancy in Sierra Leone (October 15, 2014)
Presenter: Lindsay Stark
Respondent: Sarah Lilley
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Phase One: Ethnographic study to understand how communities in Sierra Leone approach child protection
Phase Two: Developing culturally relevant indicators of child protection outcomes
Phase Three: Community participation in action research: developing an intervention to reduce teenage pregnancy
Phase Four: Baseline Studies
Phase Five: Midline Evaluations
Additional resources:
Wessells, M., Lamin, D., King, D., Kostelny, K., Stark, L., Lilley, S. The limits of top-down approaches to managing diversity: Lessons from the case of child protection and child rights in Sierra Leone. Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology (in press).
Wessells, M., Lamin, D., King, D., Kostelny, K., Stark, L., Lilley, S. (2012) The disconnect between community-based child protection mechanisms and the formal child protection system in rural Sierra Leone: Challenges to building an effective national child protection system. Vulnerable Children and Youth Studies: An International Interdisciplinary Journal for Research, Policy and Care, 7(3):211-227.