Sexual and reproductive health service utilization of young girls in rural Ethiopia: What are the roles of health extension workers? Community-based cross-sectional study

OBJECTIVE: Little is known about the extent to which Health Extension Programme (HEP) has played its role to increase service uptake among young girls. This study aims to estimate the status of young girls’ sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services utilisation in rural Ethiopia and to examine the role of health extension workers (HEWs) in this regard. DESIGN: A cross-sectional study. SETTING: A community-based study among all nine regions of Ethiopia. PARTICIPANTS: Nine hundred and two young girls aged 15–24 years were included in this study. METHOD: We used data from the national HEP assessment, collected from March to May 2019. Multilevel binary logistic regression was used to investigate the association between exposure to HEP and SRH services utilisation of young girls and we reported an adjusted OR with a corresponding 95% CI as measure of the degree of associations. RESULT: Only 19.18% (95% CI 16.74% to 21.89%) of young girls used SRH services with significant regional variability (intraclass correlation coefficien=17.16%; 95% CI 6.30% to 39.99%). Exposure to HEP (adjusted OR, aOR 3.13, 95% CI 2.03 to 4.85), knowing about the availability of HEP services (aOR 3.06, 95% CI 1.75 to 5.33) and having good trust in HEWs (aOR 1.82, 95% CI 1.07 to 3.10) and other sociodemographic factors were significantly associated with increased SRH services utilisation. OUTCOME: SRH service utilisation. CONCLUSION: Although the overall SRH service utilization of young girls in rural Ethiopia was very low, HEWs have a great contribution to improving service utilization of young girls through strong health education provided during home visits, school visits and at health posts. More investment along this line has the potential to improve service uptake among young girls. Encouraging HEWs to build trust among this segment of the population and creating awareness of SRH-related services is crucial to improv service uptake.