Kenya’s education gap: Why teen mothers struggle to return to school

Individual adulthood all round life performance is affected by experiences as a child at the age of 0-3 years, and life is impacted closer to beyond repair from age 3-8. This is the Early Childhood Development Education (ECDE) period, and consequently one is considered fully grown up at age 22, when scientists say the brain is fully developed.

Experts say that trauma at ECDE age to the time when a brain is fully developed can easily mutate to affect or corrupt individual genes and become transferable from one generation to the other, thereby affecting an entire lineage.

According to Emis Njeru, Director ECDE at the Ministry of Education, learning ‘poverty’ in our schools is as a result of early development challenges.

“Why do we have many E grades in our Kenyan schools today? They are as a result of backgrounds, are the children getting the right trainings at home? Are they able to conceptualise what they are learning?” He posed.

Mental development of kids is key and a mechanism proposed by experts to be in check all the time for a fruitful Kenyan generation. As such, a vice like teen pregnancy can be dealt with when parents or guardians begin to have open sexual reproductive health talks with both boys and girls at an early age.

But, when it happens that a teen has been caught up in an unwanted pregnancy, all is not lost, that particular child mothering a child can still be helped. Depending on how the matter is handled, the approach to tackle the situation can forever change destiny to perish or flourish for generations to come.

Adolescent pregnancy is a serious Sexual Reproductive Health issue in Kenya. Most cases are violations, especially where grown men become intimate with children, it doesn’t matter the circumstances. Unfortunately, the male will almost always get away with it in the spirit of patriarchy.

Comprehending research released in March 2025 by Zizi Afrique Foundation titled ‘School re-entry study among adolescent mothers in Kenya in the context of nurturing care framework for children 0-3 years,’ it is evident that out of all the parents and guardians sampled as support systems to teens in caring for their babies, out of the sample size in three counties, only one male is documented to be supportive, and it turns out that he is the only parent to the girl existing. In other words, he had no option in offering her daughter shoulder to lean on. Also, the infants are not getting the best care a child is supposed to get, hence another challenge in waiting.

It emerges that out of 10 teens who drop out of school because of pregnancies, only two can be traced back in school. This is because of lack of support from parents, relatives, guardians, teachers to fellow students. The teen mothers further are stigmatised due to immoral branding from various quotas.

A huge role to motivate the teen mothers back to shape and become positive about going back to pursue education is played by parents, guardians and school heads, most of whom unfortunately have turned out to be cruel.

In the year 2020, during the reign of the late Professor George Magoha as Education Cabinet Secretary, the government of Kenya for the first time published a school re-entry guideline for children caught up in various issues including: teen pregnancies, drug abuse, child labour, among other vices which disrupts them from learning.

However, the policy, which is also meant to cover for teen mother readmission to school, seems not to have gotten attention of the key players; parents, guardians and school heads. A case of ‘wall decorative’ policies as teen mothers are left to languish in shame and stigma with an immorality brand.

According to Dr. Maurice Mutisya, Director of Research at the Zizi Afrique Foundation; “In all schools we went to, the school heads are aware of the guidelines but they lack copies and are not able to speak in depth about them; It’s only one school that the principal had the guidelines.”

“Another key thing that is emerging is about the knowledge of education stakeholders particularly in the counties of our studies: Samburu, Siaya, Mombasa. In some schools the adolescent mothers are unwelcome, some girls also fear being ashamed by their teachers, stigmatization also came out strongly, sending us back to school administrations on how to support the girls to address the barriers.”

“The research indicates that teenage pregnancy and caring for the babies is also a hindrance to going back to school, and it is only now that stakeholders have to rethink collectively in getting a solution, have we done our homework in terms of supporting these girls, and we also have to get to root causes of teenage pregnancies.”

Dr.  Mary Chepkemoi, Director of Gender at Zizi Afrique Foundation, added: “Is it that we are waiting for the girls to get pregnant and focus on the pregnancy and the problems that come with it? We are in the conversation of gender equality, women taking up spaces standing for themselves and voicing their concerns, but this of course affects a child of a teen mother, for instance  where will a woman who was a teen mother get the legitimacy to tell her own daughter not to  have a child say at 13 or 14? So, it brings in a dilemma, and if we are not careful, we are going to bring about gender poverty.”

The research however, implied that children of teen mothers who go back to school, unfortunately face a number of developmental challenges like inconsistency with immunization, frequency of feeding the child, playing with the child, cleaning the child among others.

This is because without resources, teen mothers cannot hire caregivers, their brains are not fully developed that they have the reasoning mechanism to provide for the child, hence the baby is at the mercy of the grandparent, from whom there is unlikely to be 100 percent attention because they also have to balance between other responsibilities like providing for the entire family.

This comes at a time when a number of CSOs across the African continent are meeting in Kenya to develop a charter to look at Sexual Reproductive Health Rights (SRHR) with adolescent pregnancies and care giving at the centre of discussion.

Maureen Onyango, SRHR lead at FEMNET, says: “Development of this SRHR charter is very key, because it will look at issues which are age appropriate, language resonating with Africa, some inclusions into this charter will be services to children, care giving which is age appropriate, adolescent age appropriate scientifically proven care, women and men alike as reproductive health issues don’t end at any age.”

In the meantime, it is an urgent collective call to have Kenyan education stakeholders step out to intervene in rescue and nurturing tomorrow’s generation.

This as the research recommends that the Ministry of Education strengthens its supervisory role in monitoring the implementation of the re-entry guidelines.