Yes! Girls as young as 10 are getting pregnant

Extraordinary times call for extra-ordinary measures. This is the impression created by the Elgeyo Marakwet Cabinet Executive Committee member for Health Services and Sanitation, Michael Kibiwott, at the recent Maisha Conference hosted by the National Syndemic Disease Control Council (NSDCC) in Mombasa.

Kibiwott was talking about measures he has put in place to deal with gender issues in his county. One is to award a huge sculpture of a pregnant man to the Member of County Assembly (MCA) whose ward has the highest number of teenage pregnancies.

If such an MCA doesn’t take action, then there must be something very wrong with his sense of honour. Hilarious as it sounded, the plan is a creative way of tackling an intransigent problem and accounting for each pregnancy.

According to the 2022 Kenya Demographic and Health Survey (KDHS) report, 15 per cent of women aged 15–19 have ever been pregnant, the percentage rising with age, from 3 pee cent among women age 15 to 31 per cent among those aged 19.

Kibiwott is thinking of an equally graphic award for the MCA whose ward will have the highest cases of gender-based violence and HIV, the two other arms of the triple burden, the current focus of NSDCC’s work. The nexus is that if children are pregnant, they must be having unprotected sex, which means they are exposed to the risk of HIV infection.

Adolescent pregnancy

At the same conference, Senator Catherine Mumma made a passionate presentation on the imperative to tackle teen pregnancy through adolescent health. “If we acknowledge the adolescent health situation, we will not talk of adolescent pregnancy,” she said, adding that “we are killing the nation if we don’t do anything about adolescent health.”

This was informed by the reality that girls as young as 10 are getting pregnant going by records in health facilities. That this is an indicator of defilement calls upon us to compare the statistics with those of convicted defilers. If the two do not tally, then the system is not doing its work in implementing the Sexual Offences Act.

Mumma took issue with the fact that KDHS data only captures girls aged 15 and above, turning a blind eye to the fact that those below that age are sexually active and being forced into premature parenthood. Simply put, this is a falsification of reality.

Illustrating the legal paradox of definition, Mumma observed that adolescents who seek contraceptives are sent away by health facilities because they are minors. Yet when they return to the same facilities pregnant, they are accepted into antenatal care. How can they have legal capacity to get such services and not contraceptives, which would have tamed the pregnancies? She proposed several measures on the subject.

First is to have candid conversation about a comprehensive adolescent health policy that is implemented, instead of the dead ones wasting space in governmental quarters because nobody wants to antagonise parochial and conservative religious actors.

Second is to acknowledge that “the best place for sex education is the school”. This sentiment is supported by the 2018 Public health England: Teenage pregnancy prevention framework, which shows that young people cite school as the preferred source of sexuality education, ahead of parents and health professionals. In tandem, England made such education statutory since 2020.

Health insurance

Third is to recognise that services must also reach girls out of school. This calls to question the government-sponsored sanitary pads programme, which assumes that only girls in school have menstrual hygiene management needs. Fourth is to embed adolescent health in the curriculum of all medical schools, so as to produce health professionals adequately equipped to deal with the issue.

Fifth is to have KDHS revise its data collection parameters by including and giving visibility to girls younger than 15, captured as a group at risk by health centres. Sixth is inclusion of adolescent health in the universal health coverage and national health insurance.

Seventh is to take to task the family and religion on their opposition to sexuality education. Mumma decried the fact that most religious institutions do not even have policies against sexual harassment and behave as if sexual subjects are non-existent.

Eighth is to amend the Sexual Offences Act, which criminalises boys who engage in consensual sex with girls of their age. The attitudinal irony is that such boys are sent to jail while the partners are “rescued”. Who then will rescue the boy from the injustice of the law? Last, is to allocate adequate funds for adolescent health.

As we wait for Kibiwott to deliver his awards, and be emulated by other counties, Parliament should urgently rally around Senator Mumma’s ideas. Children simply have no business getting pregnant. 

The writer is an international gender and development consultant and scholar ([email protected])