A letter to the parents who walked away from their pregnant daughters
A teenage girl who is supposed to be in Form Three takes care of her child in Ng’enyilel, Uasin Gishu County.
What you need to know:
- Kenya's return-to-school policy must be fixed to account for girls whose parents have walked away.
- But while we wait for systems to change, you hold a key no policy can replicate. Schools have opened. Your daughter is waiting.
Last week, a young woman reached out to me. She had heard I was looking for someone to help my mother in the village. She is 28, a mother of three. Her firstborn is in Grade Five.
Do the math.
She was 15 when she got pregnant — marking the end of her education. What followed was an early marriage to a different man who, sensing her vulnerability and dependence on him, mistreated her for years before kicking her out. By then, she had two more children. She is also an orphan. She had nowhere to turn.
As I write this, she is at my mother's home with her children. We are enrolling them in a local primary school. The youngest is only three. When you speak to this young woman, you realise immediately that she is intelligent, articulate and capable. She should have been in a classroom, sat her exams and pursued her dreams. Instead, she is 28, unsure of her tomorrow, dependent on the kindness of strangers.
I share her story because it haunts me — and it is not unique.
Today, our Gender Desk has published a feature on Kenya's return-to-school policy and the teenage mothers it has failed. These are girls defiled, often by relatives, then abandoned by their own families.
The policy guarantees them re-entry. But when your parents have disowned you, when bursary applications require documents from guardians who have declared you dead to them, that guarantee means nothing.
Over the years, we have published hundreds of stories on teenage pregnancy and defilement. We have interviewed survivors, policymakers, child protection officers, teachers and medical workers. We have also documented the failures, the gaps and the bureaucratic absurdities.
And yet here we are, in January 2026, still asking: Who will take these girls back to school?
So today, I am not writing to policymakers but to you — the parent who discovered your daughter had been defiled, that she was pregnant, and decided she was no longer your child.
I am not writing to condemn you but to ask you questions.
When you told her to leave, where did you imagine she would sleep? When you called her a prostitute — a child violated by a man she trusted — did the word feel true, or did you use it to make your decision easier? When you closed your door, did you know you were also closing her path back to school? That the bursary forms require your identity card? That the re-entry policy assumes she has a parent willing to walk her to the school gate?
Without you, she has no paperwork. And in Kenya, a child without paperwork is one without options.
Perhaps you were ashamed and this shame made you cruel. But the law is clear: under the Children Act 2022, neglect of a child is a criminal offence. When you abandoned your daughter, you broke the law.
But I am not calling for your prosecution. I am calling for your conscience.
The shelters are overwhelmed. The donors are retreating. The government has written a policy but built no system to carry your daughter when you refuse to. She is caught between a law and a parent who says she no longer belongs to them.
That 28-year-old woman at my mother's house? She is what happens when no one intervenes — when a girl is abandoned at 15 and left to navigate the world alone. She survives, yes. But survival is not the same as thriving.
Kenya's return-to-school policy must be fixed to account for girls whose parents have walked away.
But while we wait for systems to change, you hold a key no policy can replicate. Schools have opened. Your daughter is waiting.
Will you take her back?
Sincerely,
