Sexual initiation and union formation among adolescent girls in four Sub-Saharan African Countries

In sub-Saharan Africa, the transition of adolescent girls to first sexual intercourse is increasingly occurring before marriage. Yet sexual initiation and union formation continue to be analyzed separately, even though it is well-established that social and economic changes have simultaneously affected the timing of marriage and the context of sexual initiation in this region. In addition, most of the existing studies are plagued by the limitations of non-representative cross-sectional data, the only ones generally available. This paper fills this gap by using rich cross-sectional, retrospective data from nationally-representative surveys of adolescents. We analyze simultaneously the factors associated with sexual initiation before and within the first union for adolescent girls age 12-19 in four sub-Saharan African countries: Burkina Faso, Ghana, Malawi and Uganda. Within the framework of event history analysis, we describe the different patterns of sexual behavior among adolescent girls in these countries. We then analyze the factors that shape adolescents’ life-courses during their transition to adulthood by modeling sexual initiation before and within the first union in a competing risks framework. Findings show that parental control has the straightforward effect of delaying sexual initiation before the first union.