It’s no problem!’: the in-school experiences of Kenyan young mothers and their challenge to the ‘problem’ of adolescent pregnancy.

• In Event: Roundtable Session 1
  In Refereed Roundtable Session: Comparative Education and Teaching

Proposal

The Covid-related school closures of 2020 drew attention to a social phenomenon that had already caught the local, national and transnational imagination: the educational exclusion(s) faced by pregnant and parenting girls. In the context of Kenya, the flames of public interest in this area had been lit back in 2016, when expanded media coverage of exams and high national enrolment in primary schools illuminated the number of ‘pregnant girls’ attending school. A renewal of attention to the 1994 Re-Entry policy, and its implications and implementation, began. In the last five years the literature body that looks at relationships between pregnancy and education has grown rapidly, as has policy and practitioner attention to the impact of these exclusions on gender equality in education. For the most part, however, emphasis has been given to the prevention of pregnancy. Comparatively less attention has been paid to looking at the educational experiences of girls once they are pregnant, once they are parents.

This paper utilises a critical feminist lens, grounded in the capability approach, to explore these experiences from the point of the view of the young mother herself. Standard academic conventions are disrupted through a true privileging of the girls’ voices that is echoed within the structure itself, as well as in the conclusions drawn. Through connections with projects implementing the Girls’ Education Challenge, in-depth and participatory interviews were conducted between five young mothers across three contexts (rural coastal, rural western, and within northern refugee camps) and four young community-based women trained as their interviewers. Data from girls was complemented by insights from project staff collected through online focus group discussions.

The rich and nuanced data from girls allowed for clarity around the constraints they face in achieving the capabilities they value, as well as their agentic everyday responses to these situations. A dialogic approach to relevant literature was then used to explore the ways in which dominant patterns of discourse appear to impose ideas about the experiences of young mothers, and solutions for ‘fixing’ them, that do not chime with the chief concerns of girls. The paper therefore contests the lacuna of girls’ voices in the literature and positions this absenting as productive of this dissonance. The final argument explores the ways in which this is also a politicised and intentional move that withdraws accountability from the school space, deflects attention from other spheres of wellbeing and agency, and instead frames the young mother as wholly responsible for her own fate, in a move that reconstitutes the old narratives of blame and shame. Implications around social protection systems, gendered expectations and school structures are explored.

Authors

• Emma Sarton, Cambridge Education

• Alicia Mills, Girls' Education Challenge