Until the last minute in 2020, while on a business trip to Chocó, Colombia, Jaime Aguirre came across a little girl—perhaps 11 or 12—who was holding an infant.
“Is this your son?” Aguirre asked. Yes, she said. He was shocked. “May I ask you – sorry – why did you get pregnant at such a young age?”
“My boyfriend at the time told me that the first time you have sex, you won’t get pregnant,” he said she replied.
Aguirre is the innovation coordinator of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in Colombia, a human rights agency focused on reproductive health. It’s the “sex agency” of the United Nations, and Aguirre describes his job as promoting health in his country by supporting new technologies. Making them accessible to young people is especially important, because pregnancy is the number one killer of girls aged 15 to 19 worldwide, according to data from save children and UNFPA.
Chocó is a poor area with a large African-Colombian population and a relatively high teenage pregnancy rate. People there were more dependent on the traditional midwifery system than the hospital system, so by the time he met the young mother, Aguirre was there to assist. Important Partera, or Important Midwife. The project is rolling out a mobile app to help midwives register newborns and identify risk factors and complications that require urgent transfer to the nearest hospital. It aims to combine the best of both worlds—preserving the wisdom and traditions of midwifery with the data and resources of the medical establishment. “The culture of innovation is very important to us,” says Aguirre.
“We feel we are one of the best kept secrets of the United Nations,” said Eddie Wright, UNFPA representative. “We want every pregnancy to go on, every birth to be safe and every young person to reach their potential.” This means helping provide people in 150 countries, including war zones, family planning, contraception and maternal health check-ups. Around the world, the agency has innovated with Big Data, drones, and even a robot in an effort to protect health and rights. Here are some of the projects they are leading.
Colombia
When Aguirre returned from Chocó, he was still thinking about the town’s high teenage pregnancy rate and maternal mortality rate. Myths about reproductive health right are playing a role, he thinks, and reversing them helps. So he started identifying the ones that were circulating on social media.
“So I got my R,” Aguirre said, referring to the programming and coding language that collects tweets in Spanish from anywhere in the world. “I found two legends very quickly,” he recalls. “And I was very nervous.” One discourages people from getting an IUD by claiming that babies can hold the device in their hands; another suggested boiling condoms and drinking water to prevent pregnancy. His team, naming the project Taboo, scaled up, captured 12,000 tweets from Latin America and Spain depicting myths about contraception. People put them in 22 popular themes that ranges from telling people they can’t get STIs through oral sex to encouraging them to use Coca-Cola as a contraceptive.
Group data, methods and abstracts are available on a website for young women, educators, and policymakers, along with infographics that debunk each myth. They shared their findings with both the Colombian Ministry of Health and district officials in Bogotá, who design sex education programs. “Behavior change is not something you can measure in the short term, but he is optimistic about the potential of his project,” says Aguirre.
Philippines
A group of UNFPA from the Philippines set up a similar project during the Covid shutdown. The country has one of the tallest teen pregnancy rates in Asia—in 2017, 9% of 15- to 19-year-olds had children. (The Philippine Commission on Population and Development, known as PopCom, calls it national emergency.) Nearly a quarter of married women and half of unmarried women in the country have unmet need for family planning.
“We recognize that data on family planning is limited and out of date,” said Leila Joudane, UNFPA representative in the Philippines. As in Colombia, a team started collecting online comments to get more current information to supplement government demographic surveys. They used Twitter and RH-Care.info, a website educating the Filipino public on reproductive health, and found that people were complaining about poor access to contraceptives. “It was a very strict blockade,” recalls Joudane. “Many people online have had a lot of challenges.” They shared this data with PopCom, answered by Dispensing birth control pills at home.
