Internal Migration and Adolescent Pregnancy in South Africa

Sibusiso Mkwananzi noted in chapter five that internal migration though widespread does not occur uniformly across global regions. Higher residential mobility has been associated with increased levels of adolescent pregnancy in previous international studies. However, the effect of internal migration on the health and well-being of individuals, especially the sexual and reproductive health and rights of adolescent women has not been explored exhaustively in sub-Saharan Africa. This study tracks the level of adolescent pregnancy in South Africa, in 2007 and 2016 to show possible changes over time in the phenomenon. Further, it compares the association between residential mobility and adolescent pregnancy in the two time periods. The study included 12 to 19-year-old women from the 2007 and 2016 South African community surveys. We applied chi-squared testing and the chi-squared test for trend at p = 0.05 for univariate and bivariate analysis. The multivariate analysis entailed random-intercept multilevel binary logistic regression to test the independent association between residential mobility and adolescent pregnancy in the past year.