The Political, Research, Programmatic, and Social Responses to Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights in the 25 Years Since the International Conference on Population and Development.

Among the ground-breaking achievements of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) was its call to place adolescent sexual and reproductive health (ASRH) on global health and development agendas. This article reviews progress made in low- and middle-income countries in the 25 years since the ICPD in six areas central to ASRH-adolescent pregnancy, HIV, child marriage, violence against women and girls, female genital mutilation, and menstrual hygiene and health. It also examines the ICPD's contribution to the progress made.

What works and what does not: a discussion of popular approaches for the abandonment of female genital mutilation.

The prevalence of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) is reducing in almost all countries in which it is a traditional practice. There are huge variations between countries and communities though, ranging from no change at all to countries and communities where the practice has been more than halved from one generation to the next. Various interventions implemented over the last 30-40 years are believed to have been instrumental in stimulating this reduction, even though in most cases the decrease in prevalence has been slow.

The effectiveness of a community-based education program on abandoning female genital mutilation/cutting in Senegal.

A pre- and post-test comparison-group design was used to evaluate the effect of a community education program on community members'willingness to abandon female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) in rural areas of southern Senegal. Developed by TOSTAN (a Senegalese nongovernmental organization), the education program aimed to empower women through a broad range of educational and health-promoting activities. Our findings suggest that information from the program was diffused widely within the intervention villages, as indicated by improvements in knowledge about and critical attitudes toward FGM/C among women and men who had and had not participated in the program, without corresponding improvement in the comparison villages.