Reproductive age is defined as between 15 and 49 by every demographic health survey in the world. But girls under 15 account for 2 million of the 7.3 million births that occur to adolescent girls under 18 every year in developing countries, according to UNFPA.
“They don’t show up in the statistics,” Anne-Birgitte Albrectsen, CEO of Plan International, told Devex at Women Deliver 2016.
For the past seven years, Plan has produced a State of the World’s Girls Report, based on surveys of millions of girls around the world, analyzed along with official United Nations and government data.