Addressing Knowledge Gaps in Adolescent Nutrition and Reproductive Health: Toward Advancing Life Skill Education and Sustainable Development

Adolescence is a crucial period of growth in the life course. WHO also suggests the importance of adolescent’s physical and reproductive health and life skills education in maintaining their physical and emotional well-being. Adolescents physical and reproductive health (ARH) and life skills education (LSE) also enhances their ability to be healthy and remain free from too-early or unwanted pregnancy, unsafe abortion, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) including HIV/AIDS, and sexual violence and coercion, sexual assault, rape and prostitution, malnutrition, unsafe abortion etc. Life skills are behaviors that enable individuals to adapt to and deal effectively with the demands and challenges of life. For improving adolescent nutritional health and well-being it is very important to assess the present status of adolescent’s knowledge in this area. The current paper attempts to study the nutritional and reproductive health knowledge of more than 4000 adolescents both boys and girls of 13-18 years, lives in different blocks of Udham Singh Nagar. A pre-designed, pretested and self-structured questionnaire was used for this purpose. Results of the study indicates that 50 per cent of studied population had poor knowledge regarding nutrition and reproductive health 39 percent of studied respondents had average level of knowledge and only 11 per cent of respondents had good level of knowledge. To improve adolescent’s condition it is important to provide them nutritional supplementation, food system and dietary intake interventions, integration with sexual and reproductive health strategies along with appropriate information regarding nutrition and reproductive health.