Kalayu Kahsay, Semarya Berhe, Mussie Alemayehu
ABSTRACT
Background: Ethiopia is the second populated country in sub-Saharan Africa with 82 million people; more than half of them are under the age of 25. Youth throughout the world are susceptible to health risks because they lack adequate knowledge, adventure, and lack of guidance about sexual and reproductive health and related concerns. Limited in being a youth-friendly, affordable, or confidential. Moreover, the environment within which sexual and reproductive health services are provided is often not sensitive to the special needs of this youth population. Little is known about the level of utilization to the standard and the predators that influence the utilization.
Objective: To assess utilization of youth friendly services and associated factors in Mekelle city.
Methods: A community based cross-sectional study, which contains both quantitative and qualitative methods, were conducted from December-7-18, 2012. Two stage cluster sampling techniques were used to select study participants. Descriptive analysis was used to show the characteristics of the youths and levels of youth friendly services utilization. To depict the effect sizes of the predators for the youth friendly utilization, multivariable logistic regression was used.
Result: A total of 330 subjects were included in the study with response rate of 100%. Of these, nearly three-fourth (69.1%) of the respondents used youth friendly services where as 47.1% reported that they did not know where to go as a main reason for not using youth friendly services. Majority of the respondents 295 (89.4%) had information about youth friendly services and 35.5% of them heard the information from media. However, 166 (53.3%) of the respondents had negative attitude towards youth friendly service utilization. Source of information about youth friendly services, knowledge and with whom you start sex have found to be independent predictors of utilization of youth friendly services.
Conclusions and Recommendations: Though attitude towards youth friendly service was negative, utilization was good. So, the government should intervene on the attitude of the participants to improve the utilization of the service.
Keywords: Youth, friendly, service, associated factors, utilization