Teen Pregnancies in a Pandemic: a Perspective from Kenya
Mariam Muchai
Positive Pregnancy Test. Photo by RawPixel.
“4000 schoolgirls reported pregnant in Machakos County,” several major news outlets in Kenya reported weeks after the lockdown in the country. Machakos county is a mostly rural area located 35 miles from Nairobi. The reported upsurge of teen pregnancies led to a lot of heated debates and conversations across the country. Cabinet Secretary of education, Magoha, distanced the ministry of education from the reported numbers claiming, “they look obnoxious.” Officials from the ministry of health while acknowledging that there is a problem, also proclaimed that the numbers reported in Machakos are “not a true reflection of the actual statistics.” However, they did not provide the “actual statistics.”
Mainstream media outlets like NTV and KTN made their way to Machakos county and interviewed a number of teenage pregnant girls. Mwikali, a nineteen-year-old girl, told the reporters, “I usually had protected sex with my boyfriend. But one day the condom burst then I realized I am pregnant.” Mwikali met her boyfriend in the year 2016 and became pregnant in January this year, before the pandemic. Lucy, a sixteen-year-old explained, “most of my friends had boyfriends. So, I also decided to get myself a boyfriend, and now I’m pregnant.” Lucy met her boyfriend in 2019 and became pregnant in March this year, at the beginning of Covid-19 lockdown in Kenya.
However, not all the 4000 girls got pregnant from a consensual sex. Most of the reported cases of teenage pregnancy are a product of defilement or incest. Lack of a national policy by the police on Sexual and Gender-Based Violence and teenage pregnancies has made addressing the problem particularly challenging. Monica, a thirteen-year-old girl, was defiled by her neighbor and dumped in the bush. Five years later, she is still suffering from trauma, fistula and memory loss because of the unfortunate experience. However, her assailant has never been punished because he is the son of a well-known public servant. Perpetrators of sexual violence also prey on people living with disabilities who are vulnerable. In Chemaner Ward, a rural area in the western part of Kenya, a girl living with albinism was raped by a relative last year.
Because of the Machakos County recent reported teen pregnancies during the covid-19 pandemic, President Uhuru Kenyatta ordered the National Crime Research Centre to probe the increasing number of Gender-Based Violence and teenage pregnancies. The government has relied on the police, community leaders and their assistants to fight Sexual and Gender-Based Violence in the community. However, there have been reports of police officers and leaders in the communities actually being perpetrators of GBV.
Even before COVID-19, violence against women and girls was of critical concern with countless women lacking access to essential services for their safety, protection, and recovery such as police and justice sector response, safe shelters, and psychosocial support. Existing inequalities in the country are now exacerbated by the pandemic and the rights of women and girls have been grossly violated. Every day in developing countries, an estimated 20,000 girls younger than eighteen years old give birth. In Kenya, nearly one in five girls aged 15-19 have already had a baby or are pregnant. Kenya has long had one of the highest underage pregnancy rates in the world. Over 13,000 teenage girls drop out of school annually because of pregnancy, (Kenya Data and Health Survey, 2014).
The problem of high rates of teenage pregnancy is not new in Kenya. Data from the Demographic and Health Surveys show that almost 2 out of 10 girls between the ages of 15 and 19 are reported to be pregnant or have had a child already. This trend has been consistent for more than two decades with little change in prevalence between 1993 and 2014. However, despite the fact that teen pregnancies have been a menace in the country, over the last few years, the latest data shows that the numbers peaked in the month of March after schools were closed over the Covid-19 pandemic. Since the pandemic hit, 20,828 girls aged between 10 and 14 years have become mothers while the older girls aged between 15-19 years, 24,106 are either pregnant or mothers already.
Who or what is to blame for these depressing statistics? The World Health Organization (WHO) states that teen pregnancies are more likely to occur in marginalized communities, commonly driven by poverty and lack of education and employment opportunities. Poverty pushes girls into activities that expose them to sexual exploitation and having sex in exchange for money and food. In such situations, young girls are not able to negotiate safer sex and are often at risk of pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections, including HIV, and violence such as rape. Take for example the case of a 19-year old girl living in Kibra who was sexually assaulted and then fell pregnant by an older man who had offered her free Wifi (to allow her to study) during covid-19 lockdown, as reported in the local dailies.
However, in the public discourse, the blame has also been shifted to the teens themselves. Some Kenyans argue that with schools’ closure, teens were left alone and therefore ‘willingly’ engaged in pre-marital sex. A story highlighted by one of the local television stations reveals this. “Blue says that she got pregnant after a fellow classmate befriended her and the two engaged in sex”. However, in Kenya, anyone under the age of eighteen cannot legally consent. The recent news that nearly 4000 girls in Machakos fell pregnant elicited two familiar reactions: denial and finger-pointing. Education Cabinet Secretary, George Magoha, blamed it on “the exposure to adult content”, adding that it led school-going children into experimenting with premarital sex. The Kenya Film Classification Board CEO, Ezekiel Mutua, blamed the surging numbers in Machakos on “vulgar vernacular music”. Among some Kenyans, the common narrative is that teenage pregnancy is a question of morals, so it is often taken as a referendum on the girl’s character.
There is need to amplify sex education in the country to curb the prevalence of risky sexual behaviors among young people.
Mariam Muchai is a Sophomore at Northwestern University and taking up a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. When she is not glued to her computer screen, she tries hard not to be the worst runner on the Nike Run Club. She is born and raised in Kenya but currently lives in Chicago.
