Background
Pacific island countries joined the rest of the world to endorse the Plan of Action (PoA) of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in 1994. The PoA recognized that individual well-being is linked with sexual and reproductive health, population and development, and that reproductive health and rights, as well as women’s empowerment and gender equality, are cornerstones of population and development programmes (1). The call for reproductive rights and universal access to reproductive health was a breakthrough for positioning adolescent health in the global health agenda. A focus on adolescents and young people called for international and national efforts to support educational and health service needs for adolescents to enable them deal with sexual and reproductive issues in a positive and responsible way (2,3,4).
The ICPD-PoA was a breakthrough for advocating reproductive health rights. Pacific island countries began to translate the ICPD-PoA to promote a rights-based approach in the delivery of reproductive and sexual health services, reduce violence against women, promote gender equality, reduce poverty, and protect the sexual and reproductive health of adolescents in the broader context of health and development.
The launch of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2000 was a noble global strategy to reduce poverty. Special recognition was given to investing in adolescent sexual and reproductive health, especially in providing an enabling environment with information and services for young people to make informed and responsible choices. This includes making decisions about contraception, delaying pregnancy and deciding on family size.
The end of the MDG era in 2015 highlighted the remarkable progress made – young people are more educated about sexual and reproductive health, they have better access to resources, have better access to reproductive health services, and are increasingly using contraception to prevent unplanned pregnancies (5,6). However, despite the gains made in the last two decades, interventions are still poorly accessible among young people, especially the less educated, the marginalized, and other disadvantaged groups living in remote rural communities (6,7).