Placing girls in the driver’s seat

On Tuesday, October 6, the Cabinet secretary for Education, Prof George Magoha, announced the phased reopening of schools. Unfortunately, when Grade 4, Standard 8 and Form Four students resume school on Monday, thousands of girls will not be among them due to teenage pregnancy.

Over the past few months, since March, when schools closed over Covid-19 fears, at least 152,000 teenage girls got pregnant.

While this huge number is shocking, the issue of teenage pregnancy is not new. Last year, more than 100 girls in Kilifi County alone sat their examination while pregnant.

Interestingly, they were the lucky ones because the vast majority of pregnant students never go back to school, which strips away bright, educationally powered futures.

We need to place our girls in the driver’s seat of their future. And we can do this decisively through education. At a practical level, and as had been evidenced by the Covid-19 teenage pregnancies, formal education keeps adolescent girls in school and at home and away from unprotected sex — coerced or otherwise. It also helps them to imagine a better future, where their hard work at school pays dividends.

 Adolescent girls

This notion of reimagining a better future is at the heart of this year’s International Day of the Girl Child that will be celebrated on Sunday. The theme of this year, which will inform the subsequent annual campaign, is “My voice, our equal future”.

This is a call to invest in our adolescent girls, so that they can become more energised and reimagine a better world, in which they are duly recognised as key players in society, not just hapless victims.

But this world is not possible if they are deprived of education.

The Constitution states, in Article 53 (1) (b), that every child has a right to free and compulsory basic education and, in Article 55 (a), that the State shall take measures, including affirmative action programmes, to ensure that the youth access relevant education and training.

As the law of the land clearly states, the rights of our pregnant female students must not be violated. Measures must be put in place to allow them to complete their education.

Ordinarily, when they get pregnant, they simply drop out of school partly due to shame and logistical issues or health-related issues such as morning sickness.

 As such, the entire burden of returning to school should not be left on their young shoulders. Rather, the government should collaborate with schools and ease this burden. These girls must be enabled to return to school because that will place them in the drivers’ seats of their lives.

Like thousands of other girls across the country, an adolescent girl from my village in rural Nyanza was unable to carry the burden of returning to school while pregnant.

Teenage pregnancy

She simply dropped out of school and, in doing so, gave up on her dreams of becoming a doctor. She also became part of the unfortunate statistics that 21 per cent drop out of primary school every year. Although teenage pregnancy is not the only reason for this high dropout rate, it is a contributing factor.

Another cause for school dropouts is child marriages. Every year, 12 million girls are married off before the age of 18. Thousands of these girls are right here in Kenya, in all the 47 counties.

According to Unicef, when girls get married before they turn 18, they are less likely to remain in school and often experience domestic violence.

The consequences can be even more fatal since teenage girls are more likely to die from complications during pregnancy and childbirth than women in their 20s.

Their babies are more likely to be stillborn or die in the first month. Such trauma doesn’t augur well for the girls’ future.

Kenya needs to reimagine and secure a future for its young girls. They are change makers who deserve to live a life free from violence and deprivation.

Two-thirds gender rule

 For this to happen, the constitutional guarantee for education must be enforced at all levels of government. Critically, the two-thirds gender rule in parliamentary representation must also be enforced because, when more women sit at the legislative table, gender-friendly decisions ensue.

On October 1, UN Secretary-General António Guterres urged member states to make concrete, time-bound and ambitious commitments to women’s leadership and full participation.

We must, therefore, not lose sight of the young girls who will grow up into leadership positions. We need to equip them with education because it’s a powerful tool that they can use to reimagine a better world and work towards it.

In the words of Nelson Mandela, “education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world”.

Ms Otuoma is the CEO, Little Angels Network, and board member of the Girl Child Network. [email protected].

Mutuma Mathiu’s column will resume next week.