Tuesday, April 22, 2014

HAVE WE FAILED TO HELP THE GIRL CHILD?



It was recently reported that 70% of girls that are re-admitted into school after falling pregnant at one school in Solwezi, Zambia, fall pregnant for the second time. 
 
The head teacher of the school said some girls are abusing the re-entry policy that the government has put in place to help them complete their education after falling pregnant. He further advised the government to attach a limit to the number of times a girl can be re-admitted into school.

There is no doubt that government had good intentions when it introduced this. Some girls have benefited from this and have managed to put their education back on track but such a high figure of girls from this particular school falling pregnant for the second time is not only alarming but a concern.  The 70% represented here is from one school only but it may be a reflection of a larger picture.

The school mentioned above is in the rural part of the country and we all know that the problem of early marriages is rife in rural Zambia than it is in the urban areas. I would not be surprised if some of the girls that are re-admitted back into school after giving birth have also been married off to the men responsible for their pregnancies.

It is common that when a boy makes a girl pregnant he must marry her. This is because that girl is now considered a “used product and no one is going to have intentions of marrying her. This could even be the reason why some of these girls have fallen pregnant for the second time because they may even be married to the fathers of their first children and hence they do not have a choice but have sex regularly and in the end become pregnant again.  

Some parents in the rural areas still think that sending girls to school is a waste of time and money because when these girls grow up they will find a man, get married to him and the man will take care of all their needs.  These are people who have lived almost their entire life in areas where people do not have formal employment based on their education qualifications.

Their livelihood revolves around farming, fishing or hunting.  This to some extent can make us understand their reasoning because  what use would it be to them to spend more than 12 years in school and just end up farming and fishing?  Most of these families are very poor and have very little resources. In some cases they have to choose among their kids who to spend the little resources on in terms of providing education.

In most cases a boy child will be preferred over a girl child to be the sole beneficiary of the meagre resources available to the family.  Apart from the idea that boys have a better chance to migrate to urban areas where their education may be of use, some parents fear that the girl child may just fall pregnant midway through her education and fall out of school.

If that happens, it simply means that all the resources that were poured into that girl’s education were just wasted when it could have been used on something else which would have benefited the family.

Boys have always had an advantage over the girls. This is one reason why in Zambia examination selection points for girls are lower than the ones for boys.  It was felt that many Zambian girls were disadvantaged because they did a lot of work at home compared to the boys. The girls would wake up in the morning, sweep the house or the compound and even wash the plates before leaving for school while the boys would only wake up, wash and dress for school.  This also meant that unlike the girls, the boys had a lot of time to study which gave them an advantage over the girls when it came to the final examination.

The boy child always had less work to do especially in the urban set up. He had a lot of time to study and even spare some time to play football and other social games. It is also traditionally accepted that a child must learn some chores at an early age and hence chores are a normal part of the growing up process of many African children. It is even believed that if a girl child does not do some of these chores in her early years such a girl will grow up to be a useless woman who may even fail to look after her own family when she grows up.

In a way, the chores that the girl child does are not necessarily to help the mother but it is some kind of curriculum to prepare her on how to look after her own house when the time comes. This implies that there was no way this was going to be easily discouraged so the government devised a system of doing the girl child  a favour by lowering examination selection points.

This however did not make the girl child entirely free from impediments in her educational process. The onset of puberty brings its own challenges. The hormones start raging and the curious mind keeps probing.  At a certain age, the girls and boys start to have sexual feelings for each other and engage in premature sex. Without the full knowledge or experience, these girls do not know how to use protection against unwanted pregnancies and this is where some of them get pregnant.

This is the stage where most of those who fall pregnant are given a second chance to go back to school and start all over again by being given a second chance. It is quite obvious that most of these girls who are caught up in this predicament do so out of ignorance or pure mistakes.  But why do some of them repeat the same mistake and fall pregnant again?


I remember when I was still in school, we used to have situations where all of a sudden one of the girls stops coming to school. Days went on and on until at last we heard that she was married. This used to be a big shock because we tried to comprehend why someone who was still in school and always had this great idea of being a doctor or professor would all of a sudden change her mind and decide to get married.

What we did not know was that the reason these girls dropped from school was because they got pregnant and were forced to get married to the boys or men who were responsible for their condition. It only dawned on me years later when I was old enough to grasp the whole the truth. It was shameful and a disgrace for the girl and her family when this happened and the affected family had to make it look honourable by claiming that the girl just decided to get married on her own.

There is no doubt that some of the girls may have envied this because they thought marriage was an easier option than toiling in class to get a better grade. Some girls opted to drop out on their own before the school authorities knew what was going on while others used to come to school with a “hidden” womb. It was not strange to hear rumours of girls who would hide their pregnancies by tightening their belts around the stomach.  It was also uncommon to hear of inspections conducted on girls to check for hidden pregnancies.

Some of the girls who were caught in these random inspections were very bright girls and with a brighter future but the mistake of falling pregnant put an end to their ambitions and dreams.  However, their partner in crime, the boy child, was not expelled from school for this misdemeanour of causing the pregnancy. This was the case even in situations where the boy was reported to the school authorities.

Despite the boy being charged for making a girl pregnant and in some cases even asked to marry her after he completes his education, he had some kind of immunity from the punishment of being expelled from school.  The government thought the only way to help the girl child was to give her a second chance where she was going to be accepted back in school and continue with her education after giving birth. That was a fair and brilliant idea and many people welcomed it.

Now we are being told that some girls are abusing this privilege by falling pregnant for the second time. Does this mean that this policy has completely failed? Are these girls truly abusing this privilege intentionally? I strongly feel that these cases need to be studied thoroughly to determine the real cause for this. Some girls may have been raped or tricked into having sex or enticed by money and that may have caused them to fall pregnant.

We cannot rule out the notion that some of these girls were completely aware of what they were doing and they knew the consequences.  They may even have decided to fall pregnant purposefully because they knew that they were still going back to school after giving birth.

This could be a lesson that teaches us that changing the rules or softening them does not mean the problem has been solved.


Image courtesy of Africa, freedigitalphotos.net

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