Nangila* and her boyfriend were both in Form Four at a mixed-day school in Kakamega County when she got pregnant in 2018.

| Francis Nderitu | Nation Media Group

Experts mull future of girls as 100,000 in four counties fall pregnant

More than 100,000 teenagers in four counties fell pregnant last year in the wake of restrictive measures to contain the spread of Covid-19, leading to experts saying it is time to implement measures to safeguard the future of girls.

Worryingly, most of the girls aged 10-19 were then married off owing to the pregnancy, while others got pregnant in forced marriages, says a study by the Presidential Policy and Strategic Unit, released on Tuesday.

The survey, which investigated the impact of Covid-19 on adolescents in Kisumu, Nairobi, Wajir and Kilifi counties in June-August 2020 and February, this year, established that 250,000 girls and 125,000 boys did not resume learning when schools reopened.

Of these, more than 100,000 girls had dropped out of school due to pregnancy. The rest cited lack of school fees as the reason for not going back to school.

Nationally, records from the Ministry of Health indicate that more than 328,000 girls got pregnant in the first year of the pandemic.

A total of 3,921 adolescents were interviewed in the initial survey, two thirds of them female. In the repeat survey in February, 2,747 respondents, split equally among boys and girls, were drawn from the original cohort for the interviews.

Kisumu county leads with the highest number of teenagers who were pregnant or had recently had a baby at 13 per cent.

Nairobi is second with five per cent, followed by Kilifi at four per cent. In Wajir, nine per cent of the girls who were either pregnant or had recently had a baby had been married off.

Transactional sex 

The main contributing factor to the unplanned pregnancies was lack of money, leading the girls to engage in transactional sex for food or menstrual hygiene products.

And it is in Kisumu that the adolescents most skipped meals. The 72 per cent of the adolescents in the county went without food since their parents or guardians had lost their income.

Further, the study shows only 54 per cent of the girls in Kisumu County had access to sanitary towels. In Nairobi, Kilifi and Wajir, the girls had higher access to the pads in 2020 than in 2021.

However, overall, teenage girls in Wajir County, where child marriage is most prevalent, had the least access to the menstrual products. Access was at 34 per cent last year compared to 33 per cent this year.

In Nairobi, the access dropped from 51 per cent in 2020 to 44 per cent in 2021.

Similarly, in Kilifi, the access to sanitary towels decreased to 56 per cent from 57 per cent.

The closure of schools predisposed them to child marriages, peer pressure, and an increase in unsupervised time, leading them into sexual interactions.

Throughout the study, the adolescents said being in school kept them safe, happy and filled them with hope for a better future.

Staying out of school exposed 52 per cent of boys and 39 per cent of girls to physical violence, while sexual violence was almost exclusively experienced by adolescent girls.

The report states that half to three-quarters of the interviewed adolescents reported that violence had increased, compared to the pre-Covid-19 period. This was the result of loss of employment and income for parents and guardians, stresses in the home arising from restricted movement forcing families to spend time in smaller spaces, and in some cases, unintended pregnancies.

Safeguard girls

The numbers are worrying and experts in sexual and reproductive health say it is time to be deliberate on implementing multi-sectoral measures to safeguard the future of girls.

“The future of girls is absolutely compromised when they cannot access education because of pregnancy. Without an education, they are curtailed from optimising their capabilities and future opportunities. And the community loses out on their input in building a sustainable society,” said the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) representative for Kenya, Dr Ademola Olajide.

He noted that: “We must employ a multi-sectoral approach to end these teenage pregnancies ... ensure girls have access to right information to make informed choices,” he added.

The report also recommends investing in preventing teenage pregnancies and early marriages, through family, cultural, school, community and faith-based spheres of influence.

Kenya has since 2013 made commitments towards safeguarding the adolescents’ sexual and reproductive rights, measures that would lead to reduced teenage pregnancies.

It was one of the 20 countries that signed a 2013 Ministerial Commitment on comprehensive sexuality education and sexual and reproductive health services for adolescents and young people in Eastern and Southern African during a high-level meeting of Ministers of Education and Health held in Cape Town, South Africa.

In 2015, the Ministry of Health rolled out a National Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health Policy (2015), which provides for age-appropriate comprehensive sexuality education alongside provision of sexual and reproductive health services friendly to 10-19 years.

The terms of these commitments were reinforced during the 25th anniversary of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) Programme of Action held in Nairobi in 2019.

The government, particularly, committed to employing innovation and technology to ensure adolescents and youth access quality health services, including those related to sexual and reproductive health.

Last January, during a reflection of efforts made since the ICPD25 summit, Health Chief Administrative Secretary Mercy Mwangangi said about 0.5 million adolescents had accessed health services in 2020. She said the ministry offered the teenagers tele-health services on sexual and reproductive health.

The study, however, reveals family planning and pre-natal care to be among the least services sought by the adolescents and adults in the past Covid-19 year.

“Of the health services that adolescents and adults needed ... five per cent would have sought for family planning and four per cent for pre-natal care services,” states the report while attributing financial constraints to low access to the respective health services.