Resident Coordinator's Remarks for Learning Exchange about Thailand’s Act for Prevention and Solution of the Adolescent Pregnancy

Khun Ureerat, Mr. Martua Damanik, Mr. Nazrudin, Mr. Tacardon,

Experts, colleagues and friends.

I would like to welcome all the distinguished experts to this important exchange about how to prevent teenage pregnancies, which can pose significant long-term risks to the welfare and wellbeing of both mothers and their children.

This issue has been high on the UN Country Team’s agenda and I believe Thailand’s experience can inform good practices elsewhere across the region in the context of South-South Cooperation.

In Southeast Asia the overall adolescent birth rate remains high at 47 per 1,000 girls with rates generally higher in rural areas among the most vulnerable.

Thailand has in recent years managed to make marked progress by halving the adolescent birth rate from 45 per 1,000 girls in 2018 to just 22.

By 2030, the country seeks to achieve a national target of 15 per 1,000 girls.

This success has been a demonstration of both political will and targeted initiatives in support of the country’s Act for Prevention and Solution of the Adolescent Pregnancy Problem.

The Department of Health under the Ministry of Public Health has been instrumental in moving this law forward and ensuring its implementation through broad-based collaborations of all stakeholders nationwide.

Experience tells us that the key ingredient of progress in reducing teenage pregnancies lies in empowering young people to take better care of their reproductive health.

To that end, together with the Government, the UNCT, led by UNFPA, has been working on transformative initiatives, including digitization.

UNFPA’s pioneering “Teen Club” digitalized service has enabled some 50,000 young people to take better reproductive health decisions.

Simultaneously, in a public-private partnership with the Ministry of Public Health and a multinational company, the UN agency is training 200 traditional birth attendants from ethnic minority communities in 57 border villages.

As a result of this collaboration, many vulnerable mothers and their children in remote and underprivileged communities now have access to safe birthing practices, which is deeply heartening and encouraging.

We are changing lives for the better as we continue our work to ensure that no one is left behind. Recently I had the opportunity to visit some of these communities and saw these positive changes first hand.

Initiatives like this can be scaled up and replicated in other countries across the region. By boosting their impacts through South-South Cooperation, we can also capitalize on social returns on investments.

For instance, UNFPA’s groundbreaking work on assessing such returns indicated that every dollar invested in training midwives in Lao PDR yields a social value of $4.

The governments of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and other Southeast Asian nations are similarly investing in policies and strategies to reduce unintended pregnancies among women and girls.

Today’s exchanges will allow us to review and share lessons learned as well as policy implementation gaps that will need to be bridged for progress on this critical issue.

Allow me to wish you all fruitful dialogues to take this agenda forward in the region.

Thank you.