OVERVIEW Teenage childbearing: a growing public health concern in need of urgent policy and program action Rajesh Kumar Rai & Prashant Kumar Singh & Chandan Kumar & Sulabha Parasuraman Received: 21 September 2012 / Accepted: 13 December 2012 / Published online: 8 January 2013 # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013 Abstract Aim While there has been a considerable decline in birth rate worldwide, there is growing concern among program and policy makers about the level of adolescent birth rate (ABR, birth per 1,000 women aged 15–19 years), common- ly considered an indicator of teenage childbearing, a poten- tial cause of maternal and child morbidity and mortality. This has also been addressed in the fifth Millennium Development Goal. The insufficient performance in reduc- ing ABR led to the establishment of the United Nations Interagency Task Force on Adolescent Girls (UNITFAG) in 2010. The UNITFAG aims to make girls a priority in national development planning and it is expected that by 2015, the task force would have successfully rolled out comprehensive programs in twenty developing countries that will improve their health and education, promote their leadership skills and protect them from violence. In this overview, we discuss both the accomplishments and the barriers faced in addressing ABR globally, and the policies and programs required to tackle them. Subject and methods Literature review Results We propose a bi-model approach to address the issue of teenage childbearing. The approach includes pre- venting early marriage and focuses on postponing childbear- ing among girls who were married at an early age. Conclusion The most effective approach to make commu- nities realise how teenage childbearing compromises the health of mothers as well as their children is the targeted community based intervention. Keywords Teenage childbearing . Adolescent . Program and policy . Millennium Development Goal “Many of the 600 million adolescent girls living in developing countries remain invisible in national policies and programmes. Millions live in poverty, are burdened by gender discrimination and inequality, and are subject to multiple forms of violence, abuse, and exploitation, such as child labour, child marriage and other harmful practices. The full potential of these girls and their contribution to their communities have yet to be realized”. The United Nations Interagency Task Force on Adolescent Girls, 2010 Introduction In 2000, the heads of 189 countries endorsed eight goals of the Millennium Declaration and promised to make every effort to reduce maternal deaths by one third by 2015. This represents Millennium Development Goal 5 that would require a yearly decline of 5.5 %, which is little less than double the current yearly rate (5.2 %) of reduction (WHO 2010). Global actors signed a consensus to discourage ado- lescent fertility in order to reduce maternal mortality and to extend universal health care. It has been more than a decade since the declarations were signed, yet most of the develop- ing countries are struggling to reduce high adolescent fertil- ity, commonly measured as the adolescent birth rate (ABR, R. K. Rai (*) Tata Institute of Social Sciences, P.O. Box 8313, Mumbai 400 088, India e-mail: rajesh.iips28@gmail.com P. K. Singh International Institute for Population Sciences, Govandi Station Road, Deonar, Mumbai 400 088, India e-mail: prashant_iips@yahoo.co.in C. Kumar Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee 247 667, Uttarakhand, India e-mail: c.kumar803@gmail.com S. Parasuraman Mumbai, India e-mail: sulabhap@rediffmail.com J Public Health (2013) 21:379–384 DOI 10.1007/s10389-012-0551-6