Toward the top of 2020, on a piece journey to Chocó, Colombia, Jaime Aguirre got here throughout a woman—maybe 11 or 12 years outdated—holding a new child. 

“Is this your baby?” Aguirre requested. Yes, she stated. He was shocked. “Can I ask you—sorry—why did you get pregnant so young?”

“My boyfriend at the time told me that the first time that you have sex, you don’t get pregnant,” he says she replied. 

Aguirre is the innovation coordinator for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in Colombia, a human rights company targeted on reproductive well being. It’s the UN’s “sex agency,” and Aguirre describes his job as bolstering well being in his nation by supporting new applied sciences. Making them accessible to younger individuals is particularly necessary, as a result of pregnancy is the primary killer of ladies aged 15 to 19 worldwide, in accordance with information from Save The Children and UNFPA.

Chocó is a poor space with a big Afro-Colombian inhabitants and comparatively excessive charges of adolescent being pregnant. People there rely extra on conventional midwifery than the hospital system, so on the time he met the younger mom, Aguirre was there to assist Partera Vital, or Vital Midwife. The venture is rolling out a cellular app to assist midwives register newborns and establish danger components and problems that warrant pressing referrals to the closest hospital. It’s meant to mix the perfect of each worlds—preserving the knowledge and custom of midwifery with the information and sources of institutional well being. “Innovation culture is very important for us,” says Aguirre.

“We feel we’re one of the UN’s best kept secrets,” says Eddie Wright, a consultant for UNFPA. “We want every pregnancy to be wanted, every birth to be safe, and every young person to reach their potential.” This means serving to to offer individuals in 150 nations, together with regions that are at war, with household planning, contraception, and maternal well being checkups. Around the world, the company has innovated with Big Data, drones, and even a robot in an effort to safeguard well being and rights. Here’s a have a look at among the initiatives they’re main.

Colombia

When Aguirre returned from Chocó, he was nonetheless pondering of the city’s excessive charges of adolescent being pregnant and maternal mortality. Myths about reproductive well being should be enjoying a job, he thought, and reversing them ought to assist. So he got down to establish those in circulation on social media.

“So I got my R,” Aguirre says, referring to the programming language, and wrote a code for scraping tweets in Spanish from anyplace on the earth. “I found two myths very quickly,” he recollects. “And I was very concerned.” One discouraged individuals from getting IUDs by claiming that newborns might come out holding the units of their hand; one other really helpful boiling condoms and consuming the water to keep away from being pregnant. His workforce, which named the venture Taboo, scaled up, capturing 12,000 tweets from Latin America and Spain that portrayed myths about contraception. They categorized them into 22 prevalent themes that ranged from telling folks that they will’t get STIs by way of oral intercourse to encouraging them to make use of Coca-Cola as a contraceptive.

The workforce’s information, methodology, and summaries at the moment are obtainable on a website meant for younger girls, educators, and policymakers, together with infographics debunking every delusion. They’ve shared their findings with each Colombia’s Ministry of Health and district officers in Bogotá who design intercourse ed packages. “Behavioral change is not a thing you can measure in a short term,” says Aguirre, however he’s optimistic concerning the potential of his venture. 

The Philippines

A UNFPA workforce from the Philippines instituted an analogous venture throughout Covid lockdowns. The nation has one of the highest adolescent being pregnant charges in Asia—in 2017, 9 % of 15-to-19-year-olds had kids. (The Philippines’ Commission on Population and Development, often called PopCom, referred to as it a national emergency.) Nearly 1 / 4 of married girls and half of single girls within the nation have unmet wants for household planning. 

“We noticed that there is limited and outdated data on family planning,” says Leila Joudane, the UNFPA’s consultant within the Philippines. As in Colombia, a workforce started scraping on-line feedback for extra present data to complement authorities demographic surveys. They used Twitter and RH-Care.info, an academic web site for the Filipino public about reproductive well being, and discovered that individuals had been complaining about poor entry to contraceptives. “It was a very strict lockdown,” Joudane recollects. “Many people online had a lot of challenges.” They shared this information with PopCom, which responded by distributing contraceptives door-to-door.