A special World Bank-funded–Secondary education quality improvement project – alternative education pathway (SEQUIP-AEP) has offered reprieve for many teenage mothers in Tanzania, who have had to drop out of school due to child birth.
This indicates that thousands of teenage mothers will be among the 3000 girls returning to school next month.
Director of the Institute of Adult Education (IAE), Michael Ng’umbi announced that the group is part of the 12,000 girls targeted to benefit during a five-year project running between 2021/22 and 2025/26 academic year.
He said in Morogoro on Thursday,“We have embarked on the registration process by involving district education officers, ward and village executive officers.”
Tanzanian government had since June 2017 banned thousands of girls attending school if they are found to be pregnant. Ng’umbi says now the teenagers aged between 13 and 21 will be returning to school.
According to the United Nations Population Fund, one out of four Tanzanian girls aged between 15 and 19 are mothers or pregnant. The percentage of teenage mothers who have given birth or who were pregnant increased to 27% in 2016 from 23% in 2010.
Child marriage, as young as 15, which has been barred since 2016, remains an issue as one-thirds of women between 25 and 49 have been married before they turned 18, according to official data from 2016.