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Article History

Received: 3 February 2025

Accepted: 3 June 2025

First Online: 18 June 2025

Declarations

:

: This was a student led research project and as such the proposal was presented to the Department of Public Health, School of Health Sciences of Soroti University for review and approval and later submitted to Mbale Regional Referral Hospital Research and Ethics Committee (MRRHREC), which reviewed and granted ethical approval, REC No. MRRH-2024–405, as required by the Declaration of Helsinki (2013). Administrative clearance to conduct the study was sought and obtained from Kumi District Health Office.

: The authors declare no competing interests.

: Participants were recruited from the 12 randomly selected villages of the 24 villages of Atutur sub-county. Consecutive recruitment of the teenage girls from the identified households was done until the allocated sample size per village was reached.

: In accordance with recommendations from Belmont Report (1979), written informed consent was sought from participants who were of consenting age (18 years and above) and emancipated minors (those girls below 18 years but already living with a male partner, heading a household or breastfeeding a baby) while assent of the non-emancipated minors and their parental informed consent was obtained prior to interviewing.

: Confidentiality was upheld by administering questionnaires in a secure place and personal identifiers such as name, national identification number or phone contacts were excluded. The computerized data was kept secure by pass-wording and encrypting it only to be accessible to the authorized study team.

: The participants were informed of their free will to withdraw from the study at any point without any penalty.

: There was no compensation for the study participants as the research did not have any funding.