Reducing Early Pregnancy in Low-Income Countries

Early pregnancies are generally associated with negative effects on women’s
health and education (Goldin & Katz 2002; Rasul 2008), as well as their
economic achievement (Bailey 2006; Miller 2010). Early pregnancies are
also associated with poor health outcomes for the child: children born to
adolescent mothers generally have lower birth weight, and the risk of being
still born or dying in the first weeks is 50 per cent higher when the mother is
under 20 years old than when she is 20–29 years old (World Health
Organization 2014).

It is therefore of great importance to understand which interventions are
effective in delaying pregnancies among adolescent girls in developing countries, and the present chapter offers a review of the rich set of interventions that have been studied in the literature. In this review, we offer a novel approach to evaluating these types of interventions by distinguishing interventions that target girls’ mindset (preferences and beliefs) from those that relieve constraints and expand girls’ set of economic opportunities. The underlying idea is that early pregnancies may reflect both a certain mindset and a lack of alternatives.