Uganda Launches First-Ever ‘Adolescent Girls Vulnerability Index’
“Uganda has become the first country in the world to institute an Adolescent Girls Vulnerability Index [.pdf], thus recognizing the unique challenges that teenage girls face and their effect on society as a whole,” VOA News reports. The index, released earlier this month by the Ugandan government and UNICEF, “could help with policy making,” the news service notes. The index “measured things like education and rates of early marriage and pregnancy, as well as poverty levels” among girls ages 10 to 19, and “found that more than 20 percent of Uganda’s adolescent girls had ‘extreme vulnerability,’” the news service writes. “For the moment, UNICEF has no plans to extend the index to the rest of the world,” VOA notes (Heuler, 10/18).