Childhood interrupted: Busia’s 65,000 teenage pregnancies expose Kenya’s silent crisis
Pregnant teenagers. A recent report by Radio Baraza shows that over 65,000 teenage pregnancies have been recorded in Busia County in the last eight years.
What you need to know:
- New data reveals poverty, education gaps and early marriage are fuelling teenage pregnancy crisis nationwide.
- Thousands of girls face early motherhood as systemic failures limit access to education and reproductive health.
A recent report by Radio Baraza shows that over 65,000 teenage pregnancies have been recorded in Busia County in the last eight years. This translates into about 8,000 cases every year. Victims were as young as 10 years of age. The immediate consequences were pregnancy, early marriage and permanent discontinuation of formal education. Compounding factors were poverty, stigma and deficient information about sexual and reproductive health.
The 2024 study, Teenage Pregnancy and its Associated Factors in Kenya: A Multilevel Logistic Regression Analysis Based on the Recent 2022 Kenyan Demographic and Health Survey, brings out some useful insights into this phenomenon. It highlights that Kenya’s adolescent birth rates are quite high, at 96 live births per 1,000 women compared to the global average of 44.1 births per 1,000 women. It also notes that teenage pregnancy is one major cause of newborn and maternal mortality. Age, marital status, wealth, knowledge and use of contraceptives, educational level, media exposure, employment status and community-level education were significant determinants of teenage pregnancy.
Observing that national prevalence of teenage pregnancy was 15.3 per cent, the study stratifies that this problem is most common among girls with no formal education (37.75 per cent), those from poor households (19.78 per cent) and the older cohort. For instance, those aged 18–19 years were 4.03 times more likely to be pregnant than their peers aged 15–17 years. Married ones were 29.83 times more likely to become pregnant compared to their unmarried peers. Girls from wealthy households were 0.47 times less likely to get pregnant compared to their counterparts from poor households. Why? The study opines that “adolescent girls from poor households may be exposed to early marriage and sexual initiation and may not afford reproductive health services and contraceptives.” This is exacerbated by poverty and “lower expectations of future economic success”.
Citing another study, the report highlights that “non-employed adolescent girls had 1.65 times higher odds of becoming pregnant than their employed peers.” Moreover, girls with media exposure had 0.62 times lower odds of teenage pregnancy than those without. This is related to the likelihood that media exposure provides information that encourages adolescents to utilise reproductive health services. Girls with secondary education or higher had lower odds of teenage pregnancy compared to uneducated ones. Additionally, adolescent girls from communities with a high proportion of non-educated individuals were 1.31 times more likely to become pregnant than those from communities with a lower proportion of non-educated individuals.
A surprising finding is that “adolescent girls who used contraceptives were 5.91 times more likely to become pregnant … than those who did not use contraceptives.” This seems to negate the clamour for distribution of contraceptives to adolescents as one measure of reducing the scourge. The study advances possible explanations for this anomalous picture. First is contraceptive failure due to “inadequate contraceptive counselling, awareness and utilisation skills”. Second is “intermittent use of contraceptives”. Third is “supply interruption”.
This finding could mean other things. One, girls using contraceptives probably lower their guard in the confidence that they are protected, while their counterparts are stricter and abstain from intercourse during their fertile days. Two, contraceptives used by the girls are counterfeit or expired, hence ineffective. Three, girls deliberately discontinue contraceptives at some point. This finding requires further investigation given its implicit suggestion that use of contraceptives is counter-productive in taming teenage pregnancy.
Read: Too young to mother: Poverty, broken families and poor access to care fuel teen pregnancy crisis
Using statistics from 2014 to 2020, the study, Exploring Contemporary Issues of Adolescent Pregnancies in Kenya: Further Analysis of 2014 and 2020 Kenya Demographic and Health Survey Datasets Files, by Calvince Anino and colleagues presents further insights. It notes, for instance, that while teenage pregnancy was higher among younger adolescents in 2014, the reverse was the case in 2022 when it “was highest among those aged 19 years (36.3 per cent) and lowest among those aged 15 years (1.2 per cent)”. This resonates with the earlier cited study that adolescent pregnancy currently increases with age. It also confirms that age, level of education and economic status are of significance. But it adds place of residence and sexual debut. With regard to the former, it establishes that living in rural areas was more significantly associated with pregnancy than urban locations.
These findings point out leads that can be used as levers in tackling adolescent pregnancy. The anchors revolve around: delaying girls’ sexual debut; formal education to occupy the girls and improve their knowledge; retention in school; access to reproductive health information; reduction of urban-rural disparities; improvement in economic status; and delayed marriage. These studies are based on data consistently published by the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics showing the enormity of this problem. But for some reason, the subject has not attracted public outrage. Is this because we have normalised it and conceded defeat?
The writer is a lecturer in Gender and Development Studies at South Eastern Kenya ([email protected]).
