Awareness and utilization of emergency contraceptives among female undergraduates in Kano: North west Nigeria

Unintended pregnancy remains a major challenge to the reproductive health of women, especially female undergraduates. It is a cause of unsafe abortions and their attendant complications and contributes significantly to maternal mortality, which can be prevented by the use of emergency contraceptive. This is a descriptive cross-sectional study which was carried out among 374 non-medical, non-allied medical sciences, non-basic medical sciences and nonpharmaceutical sciences female undergraduates of Bayero University Kano, Northwestern Nigeria. Self-administered questionnaires were used for data collection and analyzed using SPSS Version 23.0 Software. The Chi square test was used to test for association at p<0.05The age range of the respondents was 15-45 years, with mean age of 24.98±4.96 years. Most of the respondents were between the ages of 20-29 years. More than half of the respondents (260, 69.5%) were single. The majority of the respondents (334, 89.3%) were aware of emergency contraception. There was statistically significant association between sources of information and year of study with awareness of emergency contraception (p<0.05). Respondents in this study demonstrated good awareness and knowledge of emergency contraception. Despite the conservative nature of the community where this study was conducted, there was good level of utilization of emergency contraceptives in the study population.