Tennage is key issue which needs great attention by all changemakers. We have a lot of such cases in Sierra Leone which am working on but it really challenging due to communities perceptions.

The need for school re-entry policies must be underscored. However, so much more needs to happen for teenage mothers to return to school and actively participate in the learning process. From a very personal perspective, there is need for attitudinal change from the highest level policy makers down to the teenage girls themselves, their parents and community in general. I have interacted with ‘ high ranking policy makers, administrative officials, teachers, teenage girls, parents and community members who will swear by the Bible that once a mother, a girl can never achieve anything at school again. According to this thinking, the girl should just go ahead and get married.

Every time i come across such negative thinking, i think of one of my friends, currently a very successful head teacher, doing everything within her powers to support girls stay in school and complete secondary education. My friend fell pregnant in her second year of secondary education. As fate would have it , her father would have none of it, chased her away from home, blamed her mother and married a second wife. Her mother later fell into depression, fell sick and died. My friend went to live with her aged grandmother, who took care of her and later her baby. One of her uncles was touched by her my friends remorse and took her back to school. The rest as they say, is history. Today, my friend is one of those very successful, hardworking head teachers and will do everything to have a girl stay in school. Her son, is long done with school and is doing very well, a young man set to go places.
What if her uncle did not take her back to school? Where would she and her son be?

I once had a house girl who had dropped out of school years before I met her. She had a son she got in her teenage years. Since i have a school very close to my house, I offered to take her back to school. She adamantly refused! No amount of convincing worked. Her reasons? She could not forget the bullying from school mates when they learned she was pregnant then. Worse still, she could not forget the taunting from teachers, and according to her, worse from female teachers.
While this May seem an isolated case, this could be the story of so many girls who choose to return to school and who are lucky enough to receive the support from their caregivers to return to school.

I have heard school stakeholders argue that this would encourage young girls to become irresponsible since they know they will be supported. In Africa, and in particularly in Kenya where I come from, there is the belief that such a girl needs to suffer so much and feel the pain beyond description for other girls to ‘learn’ from that girl’s suffering.

While I understand that teachers may not be equipped to handle such girls( especially from the MHPSS) perspective, I think there is need to factor a lot more into teacher education. Teacher education needs to prepare teachers to handle the day to day challenges ailing our society. This is currently not the case. Teacher education also needs to transform teachers’ attitudes So that they can be agents of change.

There is need to transform societal thinking towards teenage mothers . Policy makers, administrators, leaders, teachers, community members, parents and the teenage mothers themselves MUST believe that they can still excel and should be willing to do everything to excel.

The reason why policies are never enforced is the lack of belief in the policies even by the policy makers. And so, we have policies that are never really implemented at all. They exist in writing and that is it. Policy dissemination is also quite poorly done, no simplification and the action plans if in existence are, not broken down to household level. What should a parent of a teenage girl do to have the girl return to school? What should the girl do? To who should they report and seek support from if denied re-entry( girls get denied re-entry and nothing happens to such school administrators).

What happens in situations where those who should be enforcing policies are the very people breaching the policies? I was having a casual discussion with a woman from a community that practices FGM and the revelations from her of how administrators and doctors aid families to have their girls cut was chilling to say the least.

My conclusion is, even as we have girls in hundreds of thousands not likely to return to school due to teenage pregnancies ( during school closure from the pandemic alone), very little is likely to change unless deliberate action is taken. We must push for concrete steps and solid actions. Tired as this statement may sound’ we must get out of the board rooms and reach out to the girls in the villages! I hope it will not just be the case of ‘seasonal’ noise making after which everyone goes back to their comfort zone as the poor girls continue to waste away in their villages.

When u education agirl u educate the whole world however with determination nothing is impossible out of personal experience, in Uganda girls drop out of school because of poor financial status,the believe of girls are loses not profits, low self esteem among others

This is what I am researching now in Ghana, how these teenage mothers experience stress and how they are coping, when they go back to school. what we can do to support them.

My research is around the reintegration of teenage mothers backbto school. Do you perhaps started with the program for their return yo school? Is it successful? I want to start but seem not to have direction