Kajiado: Hundreds miss school reopening due to pregnancy
Students wait to board a vehicle at the Elburgon Matatu Terminus in Elburgon town, Nakuru County when schools reopened last week. Hundreds of girls in Kajiado County missed opportunity due to early pregnancies.
What you need to know:
- Education officials and children rights activists say the Covid-19 pandemic that disrupted the school calendar caused a rise in cases of school drop-outs, pregnancies and early marriages..
- In Elang’ata Primary School in Kajiado County, the leading student who scored 382 marks sat her exams while pregnant.
As more than one million Form One students are expected to report back to schools across the country today, hundreds of others in Kajiado County will miss the opportunity due to early pregnancies.
Education officials and children rights activists in the county say the Covid-19 pandemic that disrupted the school calendar caused a rise in cases of school drop-outs, pregnancies and early marriages.
Ms Semerian Sankori, the proprietor of Patinaai Osim, a non-governmental organisation programmed to keep children in school, told nation.africa that some parents are taking advantage of their girls’ pregnancies to marry them off.
“We’re worried that a number of our teenage girls will not transition to secondary schools because they’re either pregnant or had children. Here, it takes the goodwill of the parents for a child to go back to school after giving birth,” said the crusader.
Married off
We visited Noosidan Primary school, where of the three pupils who fell pregnant during the Covid-19 break, two have been married off. One who scored 207 marks out of 500, was lucky after the parents accepted to take care of her son.
In Elang’ata Primary School, the leading student who scored 382 marks sat her exams while pregnant. Although she deserved a position in a national school, she is attending an extra-county school nearby, while another who gave birth before sitting her examination has sadly been married off.
In Mashuru Sub-County alone, school dropout rate rose to more than 100 pupils during the pandemic with some schools recording up to 12 pupils who never returned after the Covid-19 break. Most of them girls.
The Sub-county Quality Education Director Isaiah Kishoyian, however, said the figures are only a fraction of the real picture on the ground, noting that some head teachers and chiefs are collaborating with parents to conceal sexual abuse, early marriages and drop-outs cases.
Young mothers
“As a matter of emergency, we have resorted to go to the ground and do the tally ourselves while mobilizing parents to release their children to school,” said Mr Kishoyian.
This comes as President Uhuru Kenyatta last week promised to push the enforcement of the policy of 100 per cent transition of learners from primary to secondary schools, especially for young mothers.
“We are doing our level best to ensure every single child who is supposed to be in school is back. This is something that we’re doing with both our national administration as well as the Ministry of Education. If there were cases of early pregnancies, those girls must be allowed to go back to school and ordered to complete their education,” said the President during his visit to the United Kingdom.
