Sexual and reproductive health in Pakistan: a qualitative exploratory study of gender roles, family planning and adolescent health in Chitral, Gilgit-Baltistan and Sindh
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: Sexual and reproductive health has been gaining more and more attention due to its all-encompassing definitions and inclusivity of all people, including the marginalised. However, social taboos, lack of political will, broken healthcare system, and sociocultural and economic factors continue to stand as barriers to normalising sexual and reproductive health. This paper explores this topic through focus group discussions and in-depth interviews (IDIs) (exploring both through FGD and direct view from IDIs) in Chitral, Gilgit-Baltistan and Sindh, Pakistan. Methodology: This qualitative study was conducted using a descriptive exploratory approach. The target population comprised community members from two districts in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa-Upper and Lower Chitral-as well as two districts in Sindh and six districts in Gilgit-Baltistan. These groups included married adults (aged 18-51), adolescent girls and boys (aged 14-21) and healthcare workforce members. 57 FGDs were conducted with the community and healthcare professionals between October 2020 and December 2020. A purposive sampling technique was used to identify participants, and data analysis was conducted simultaneously with data collection. Consent was obtained from each participant. Qualitative thematic analysis was conducted to identify key themes, through using manual method and NVivo. Results: Identified themes include gender inequality, adolescent health, family planning, maternal health and sexual and reproductive health. Discussion: Gender inequality in Chitral and Sindh, Pakistan, significantly impacts gaps in the healthcare system, adolescent health, sexual and reproductive health, maternal health, and family planning. The lack of access to healthcare in Chitral and rural Sindh, coupled with gender inequality, significantly impacts family planning. The limited availability of modern contraception and secondary family planning education worsens these difficulties. It will take a broad strategy to address these problems, including initiatives to promote access to family planning services, boost access to education for girls and strengthen the healthcare system in the region. Conclusions: There is a need to take a multidimensional approach that promotes women's empowerment, community involvement and focused investments in healthcare facilities and services to address gender disparity and improve access to healthcare. To accomplish these objectives, it is essential to increase educational accessibility, support gender-sensitive policies and initiatives and invest in the training of the healthcare workforce.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.006 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 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".