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Assessment of Knowledge, Attitude and Practice of Emergency Contraceptive Use among Female Students in Harar Preparatory Schools, Harari Regional State, Eastern Ethiopia

Anteneh Dagnachew

Background: Emergency contraceptives could prevent pregnancy after unprotected sexual intercourse, including coerced sex, as well as situation when no method is used or method failure or incorrect method use. This method has the potential to prevent up to 75% of unplanned pregnancies.

Objective: The aim of this study is to assess the level of Knowledge, attitude and practice of female students towards usage of ECPs in Harar preparatory schools, Harari regional state, eastern Ethiopia, 2013.

Methods: A descriptive cross-sectional study design will be conducted, to access knowledge, attitude &practice among female students towards usage of ECP on two preparatory schools (i.e. SOS and ABOKER) in harar from September to October, 2013. The stratified random sampling method will be employed with the sample size of (242) female students. These females are allocated to each study year and the size of the students in the sections. Simple random sampling method will be selected by lottery method. The data will be collected using confidential self-administrated questionnaires during one class session. And data was entered, processed and analyzed by using SPSS 20 window version.

Results: Among the participants (n=242), Majority(81.4%) of them had heard of EC, and the main source of information’s were Mass media (44.7%) and School(31.6%) and when specifically asked the type of EC by name 55.8% answered IUCD, Majority of the respondents (71.9%) have favorable attitude towards EC use. 27.3% of the respondent had sexual intercourse at least once, of this 21.5% was unprotected sex. Among those who had sexual intercourse 24.8% had ever used EC, of this 7.4% become pregnant and all of them end up in abortion. In this study knowledge and attitude towards the use of EC had significant association with religion and residence with p-value 0.007 and 0.023 respectively.

Conclusion and Recommendations: The study has revealed that while overall awareness of EC is fair, actual knowledge of EC is very low among female students in Harar preparatory schools. It is highly recommended that intervention intended to combat maternal mortality through contraception usage need to be aware of such information specific to the target group.