Abstract:

Background: Adolescents' sexual and reproductive health has gained attention among researchers due to the consequences encountered by most female adolescents such as physical, cognitive, emotional, sexual, and social impacts. These impacts mostly are due to a lack of access to sexual and reproductive health services as seen in low- and middle-income countries, 2019 there were about 49% unintended pregnancies, with about 16 million of those pregnancies not having received the care they needed due to pregnancy complications and the majority of them being adolescents.

Objective: This study aimed at identifying the factors that affect the accessibility of sexual and reproductive health services to adolescents.

Methodology: This was a cross-sectional school-based study done among adolescents at selected secondary schools in Mwanza. Structured questionnaires were used to collect data from the participants. The obtained information was coded and entered into the statistical package and social science.

Results: A total of 362 secondary school students were recruited in the study and involved in data analysis. About half 167(46.1%) of the students reported that there was a lack of SRH services in schools . Not being encouraged by their parents 191(52.7%), and lower level of parent education (67.5%) were the main factors contributing to poor utilization of Sexual and reproductive health services.

Conclusion: The study found that over half of the students have limited access to SRH services in Mwanza, and very few of those with access utilize the available SRH services.

Recommendation: Positive deviance methods may be useful for designing effective health promotion approaches and enable more adolescents to utilize SRH services.