Health and development-related priorities and challenges of adolescents and young people: findings from South Africa and Kenya prior to and during COVID-19 pandemic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Growing evidence documents the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on adolescents in East and Southern Africa. We present and explore the longitudinal health and development-related priorities and challenges of adolescent advisors in South Africa and Kenya, including prior to, and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Findings were co-generated with adolescent advisors in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa (n=15, ages 18-22 in 2019) and Kisumu, Kenya (n=16, ages 10-14 in 2020). Prior to COVID-19, adolescent advisors engaged in a participatory exercise to share and explore their health and development-related priorities and challenges in 2019 and 2020. During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, members of the same groups shared their experiences, challenges and coping strategies in semi-structured telephone interviews (Eastern Cape: n=14, aged 19-23; Kisumu n=12, aged 11-16) and group-based remote participatory social media activities (n=27 activities with n=12 advisors, Eastern Cape). We thematically analysed COVID-19 activities, considering them alongside pre-pandemic priorities and challenges. Many of the health and development-related priorities and challenges identified prior to COVID-19 remained issues of concern during COVID-19. These included education; victimization and violence; teenage pregnancy; substance use; household tension, conflict and inadequate family and caregiver support; health and medication concerns (South Africa) and water and food shortages (Kenya). Other issues such as financial insecurity, mental health, and crime were strong themes that emerged during COVID-19, which were not directly reported as priorities prior. Although almost all of adolescent advisors' most pressing pandemic-related challenges were also priorities for them prior to COVID-19, these issues were often discussed as new, and caused by the onset of COVID-19. While demonstrating how COVID-19 has exacerbated pre-existing vulnerabilities, we also suggest that the pandemic may have brought about a new way for adolescents to make sense of, and articulate pre-existing challenges.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".