This community innovation has been accepted at the 2026 DHIS2 Annual Conference as a physical poster.
Trends of Girl-child Sexual abuse in Malawi
Most girls in the Global South drop out of school due to teenage pregnancies. In Malawi, sexual abuse is common and normalised but there aren’t any comprehensive published national studies on the topic. Victims of defilement (statutory rape) are more likely to report to the police when their sexual experience result in a pregnancy. For this reason, maternal health services data from the District Health Information System 2 (DHIS2) on antenatal, childbirth, post-natal and post-abortion care services provides room for monitoring sexual abuse towards women and girls in Malawi. In this study, graphical analysis is employed to study the trends in the number of reported cases of defilements and girls attending maternal health services Malawi’s 28 districts and four administrative regions to provide a national-level outlook of girl child sexual abuse in Malawi. To confirm if the difference in child sexual abuse variables across population groups and regions is statistically significant the Mann-Whitney U statistical test is performed. The findings of this study show that routine administrative data from the Malawi Police and Public health facilities provides a good depiction of the extent of girl-child sexual abuse in Malawi, it aligns well with survey or census data and therefore can be relied on for the monitoring of programmatic interventions to tackle child sexual abuse in Malawi. The findings suggest that while data on defilement may adequately depict girl child sexual abuse in the Northern region, maternal health data will be more useful in monitoring child sexual abuse in the Eastern and Southern regions.
Primary Author: Lana Chikhungu
Keywords:
girl-child, sexual abuse, Malawi, Sexual violence,
Hi @chikhunl
Congratulations on your acceptance.
This is a valuable use of DHIS2 routine data to address an important public health and social issue.
I am particularly interested in how you addressed underreporting and regional differences in reporting practices.
Thank you for sharing this work.
Hello Hany
That is a good question. I used mixed methods. The first step was to analyse DHIS2 data on recorded cases of post abortion care and followed it up with key informant interviews to explore explanation of the patterns obtained from the analysis of DHIS2, from 2018 to 2021. It was evident that under reporting was an issues particularly during the COVID 19 period. That finding indicated the need support in periods of adversity.