SPATIAL ANALYSIS OF ADOLESCENTS' ACCESSIBILITY TO CONTRACEPTIVES IN OSUN STATE, NIGERIA

Abstract

This study analyzed the spatial patterns of adolescents' access to contraceptives and examined the relationship between the
patterns of outlet and access to contraceptives among secondary school adolescents in three urban and three rural Local Government Areas (LGAs) in Osun State, Nigeria. Primary and secondary data were used for the study. Primary data
involved the use of handheld GPS to obtain the geographic coordinates of all the secondary schools and contraceptive
outlets in the study area. Also, questionnaire was administered to collect data on the socio-demographic characteristics of students and their access to contraceptives. Multi-stage sampling procedure was used to select respondents. The rural-urban variation in the distribution of outlets and adolescents' access to contraceptive was analyzed using statistical analysis tools. The results showed that there are more contraceptive outlets in the urban LGAs (70%) than in the rural LGAs (30%). Ninety percent of the adolescents affirmed that they had either full or partial access to contraceptives, while 10% had no access to contraceptives. Fifty percent of the adolescents reported that societal disapproval is a factor that hinders their access to contraceptives. Furthermore, results showed that correlation between the patterns of outlet and accessibility to
contraceptive in study area is (r2 = 0.580; p>0.05), this shows that there is no relationship between the pattern of outlets and access to contraceptive in the study area. The study concluded that to reduce the problem of teenage pregnancy, there is a need to address the problem of societal disapproval of modern contraceptives among adolescents.