Teenage Pregnancy and Education in the Global South

The Case of Mozambique

Francesca Salvi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351124744
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Teenage pregnancy is seen as a problem by researchers and policymakers alike all over the world, but particularly so in the context of developing countries. Here, it is seen as an obstacle to personal and national development, exacerbating the gender gap in education, and placing an additional financial burden on low income families. This book considers the opposition between pregnancy and parenthood on the one hand, and education on the other, using the specific case of in-school pregnancy in Mozambique.

Drawing on the voices of young people, their families, and their teachers, this book aims to build an understanding of how individuals and communities react to in-school pregnancy policies. The result is a critical challenge of current policy guidelines that indicate pregnant schoolgirls should be transferred to night courses, initially set up to boost adult literacy. The book also demonstrates that young people operate within a range of constantly shifting and interweaving normative frameworks, and that a nuanced understanding of their agency can only be achieved by synthesising their individual perceptions with an understanding of the social, cultural, and historical contexts in which they operate.

Concluding by stepping outside of the Mozambique case, this book aims to appeal to scholars and policymakers looking at development, gender, and education within Mozambique, but also within the Global South more generally.

1 Introduction

On the 17 April 2018, Mozambique President Filipe Nyusi told Chatham House (an independent policy institute based in London) that having pregnant girls in mainstream education promotes early pregnancy:

There is a resolution of the UN that pregnant girls should not be excluded from school, and we have not yet ratified it. We listen to the people, and not only international declarations. In Mozambique, there are no girls who cannot attend school. Pregnant girls move on to night school. Why have we not moved urgently to sign this declaration? Because there are girls, mothers, and grandparents who say that having pregnant girls in school promotes early pregnancy and we in Mozambique have the problem that children of 15–16 years old are pregnant.… We have to balance. [Should we] move forward on this and encourage children 15 years old to become pregnant just because of an international resolution?

(Hanlon, 2018)

Yet, why do we need an ‘international resolution’ to state that girls should not be excluded from school? Have they been excluded from school? Why? How does keeping girls in schools promote early pregnancy? Is pregnancy an illness that easily spreads? Is Mozambique experiencing particularly high numbers of pregnancies in schools? These are just a few of the questions that came to mind after listening to Nyusi’s contribution. I realised that the many assumptions made here lead to a number of different stories – some stories I was lucky to be part of during the time I spent in Maputo between 2010 and 2011. The rest of this book is aimed at connecting those stories with the initial questions I have asked above.

Mozambique has one of the highest rates of teenage pregnancy in Southern Africa, with 46.4 per cent of teenagers (aged 15–19) having begun childbearing (Ministério da Saúde (MISAU), Instituto Nacional de Estatística (INE), & ICF, 2018). In this sense, Mozambique stands out within the sub-Saharan African region. Yet, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) (2017), only 88 girls are enrolled in secondary school in sub-Saharan Africa for every 100 boys – the most uneven ratio of all world regions. While many factors contribute to this pervasive problem, adolescent pregnancy has been well documented as a major barrier for girls’ persistence in school (Eloundou-Enyegue, 2004; Meekers & Ahmed, 1999; Nekongo-Nielsen & Mbukusa, 2013), where it accounts for approximately 18 per cent of all female dropouts in secondary school, and 7.3 per cent in both secondary and primary school (Eloundou-Enyegue, Stycos, & Jah, 2004, p. 3). Data are more pessimistic for Mozambique, where pregnancy accounts for 39.1 per cent of the total dropouts in secondary schools, and 9.0 per cent at the primary level (Eloundou-Enyegue et al., 2004).

With a view to reducing the gender gap in education, national governments in most sub-Saharan African countries have developed policies aimed at discouraging in-school pregnancies. For example, Chilisa (2002), in a seminal paper on pregnancy policies in the education systems in sub-Saharan Africa, distinguished three kinds of policies: expulsion, continuation, and re-entry. Of the three, expulsion policies are a form of direct – not only symbolic – violence against girls, as they entail the physical removal of girls from the classes and their peers. Re-entry policies also present a threat to the education right of girls, while continuation policies are generally the most progressive. At the time of writing (2018), no country in Southern Africa still relies on an expulsion policy. While this is surely an achievement, it cannot be taken as an indicator of gender equality in education. This is because even progressive policies may not adequately counteract a stronger discourse that constructs the school as a space that excludes pregnancy and parenting, as they clash with a notion of childhood that is necessary for schools to function as they do. Pregnancy and parenthood, in other words, remain unintelligible in the context of formal schooling (Shefer, Bhana, & Morrell, 2013). This also means that a consideration of policies alone is not necessarily enough to understand how pregnant girls fare in the education system. For example, issues may arise in the implementation phase, as Bhana and others have so cogently evidenced from the context of South Africa (Bhana, Morrell, Shefer, & Ngabaza, 2010; Shefer et al., 2013). Yet, how do we grapple with policies that recognise the importance of enabling girls to stay in education, but which encounter resistance on the ground? Where does resistance come from, and how can we better understand – and respond to – it?

It should not come as a surprise then, that statements such as Nyusi’s above have recently come from other countries too. For example, Tanzania relies on The Education and Training Policy of 1995 (Tanzania Mainland), as revised and approved in June 2014, as well as the Law of the Child Act of 2009 – as informed by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). The outcome is a policy tool that enables young women to return to school after delivery, an approach broadly categorised as ‘re-entry’. Despite this strong legal backbone, President John Magufuli stated that as long as he is in office, ‘no pregnant students will be allowed to return to school’ (Ratcliffe, 2017). This claim rests within a highly controlled educational environment, where mandatory pregnancy testing is routine and more than 55,000 Tanzanian schoolgirls have been expelled from school over the last decade for being pregnant (Ng’wanakilala, 2017).

This is a good time to introduce one of the young women I spent time with in Maputo. Zara (not her real name) was 19 years old at the time of this interview. She told me:

I do not believe that every girl wants to leave school as soon as she gets pregnant. Yet, it is very difficult to stay put when the system encourages you to leave and go home. I think the context in which the pregnancy occurs is very important. A healthy environment would not cast any shame on pregnant girls, so she would not have the urge to leave and hide from her peers. I think a pregnancy cannot be considered negative or wrong. What is negative is the discrimination within the school. What I want to say is, it is not pregnancy that discriminates, but the school.

Zara was a 19-year-old single mother to Clayton, who was seven months old at the time. Zara’s boyfriend left her upon finding out that she was pregnant, claiming that he was not responsible for her pregnancy. He was not contributing, financially, socially, or emotionally, to Clayton’s upbringing. Zara was living with her parents, who agreed to share their resources with her and her son, despite not being well-off. Zara left school when she got pregnant. She was initially transferred to night courses,¹ but found it very hard to attend, mainly due to the long commute, and her fears of the dangers of being out at night. When we arranged our interview, she had plucked up the courage to attend night classes while struggling to find a job.

Zara’s story illuminates the contentious relationship between education and schooling on the one hand, and sex, pregnancy, and parenthood on the other. These notions are often constructed in opposition to one another, rendering in-school pregnancy conceptually – and practically – impossible. I have introduced this book by representing in-school pregnancy as dichotomous to education: the latter is associated with notions of progress and development, while pregnancy works against individual and social progress, being synonymous with backwardness and tradition.

These binary oppositions constitute a starting point for this book, which I will discuss further in the next section. After that, I discuss existing terminology that defines motherhood during adolescence, with the aim of motivating my choice to talk of ‘in-school pregnancy.’ The chapter ends with an introduction of myself as the researcher, offering some insight into the mutually constituent relationship between the author and text, before outlining the structure of the rest of the book.

Making the case

Some suggest that pregnancy may be traditionally valued and encouraged as a means for self-realisation, so that individuals achieve their main purpose of contributing to the continuation of their social group (Preston-Whyte & Zondi, 1989; Walker, 1995, p. 418). For this reason, sex and pregnancy are often considered important rites of passage that heavily contribute to defining women’s positions within their communities and thereby, their social identities. Modernisation perspectives tend to oppose this view, especially when pregnancy occurs, as young people are investing in other forms of self-development, especially education and training. In this context, pregnancy is conceived as an obstacle to the education of girls. Overall, early pregnancy is depicted as an event that triggers a vicious cycle of dependency and deprivation, as the United Nations (UN) claimed in Cairo (1994):

Motherhood at a very young age entails a risk of maternal death that is greater than average, and the children of younger mothers have higher levels of morbidity and mortality. Early childbearing continues to be an impediment to improvements in the educational, economic and social status of women in all parts of the world. Overall for young women, early marriage and early motherhood can severely curtail educational and employment opportunities and are likely to have a long term, adverse impact on their and their children’s quality of life.

Pregnancy is thus constructed as a threat to education and to the production of the modernising subject, who functions according to cost/benefit analyses and frames ‘progress’ chiefly in economic terms within development discourses. This means that the concern expressed in this quote is not with the individual, their wellbeing, aspirations and development, but with the economic productivity young people allegedly forgo in becoming parents ‘too early.’

Reflecting these concerns, Mozambique endorsed policy 39/GM/2003, which indicates that pregnant girls should be transferred to night courses, together with their partners, if in the same school. If their partners are members of the school staff, they should be made redundant and reported to the police. This policy figures as the first national attempt at regulating in-school pregnancy, although some confusion exists with regards to how strictly schools are required to observe its dictates, an aspect I will discuss more thoroughly in Chapter 3. This measure was developed in an apparent effort to address in-school pregnancy as one of the main barriers to girls’ education. Yet this implies a logical chain in which tackling the main barriers to girls’ education – early pregnancy and marriage – will have the direct consequence of discouraging their occurrence, thereby increasing the number of girls in education: a single cause to a single outcome. Despite these efforts, young people’s (under 20) contribution to the country’s global fertility rate remains high. This suggests a more complex and dynamic social scenario than the simplistic policy formulation would be adequately able to address.

As stated above, teenage fertility in Mozambique has remained stable in the last 20 years. In 1997, 40 per cent of young women aged 15–19 had begun childbearing. This data was confirmed at 41 per cent in 2003, and 37.5 per cent in 2011. A more recent measure suggests this figure has gone up to 46.4 per cent Ministério da Saúde (MISAU), Instituto Nacional de Estatística (INE), and ICF, although it may be hard to compare the different instruments. Yet, this information corroborates the Inquérito Nacional Sobre Saúde Reprodutiva e Comportamento Sexual dos Jovens e Adolescentes (INJAD) (INE, 2001), which suggested that women tend to have their first child earlier. This means that young people may provide valuable insights into Mozambican fertility trends, thus complementing theories of fertility decline with the voices of a section of the population that has been largely absent or homogenised within country level data.

Mozambique was a Portuguese colony until 1975, after which 15 years of civil war ensued. A number of scholars (Finnegan, 1992; Hanlon, 1984; Mondlane, 1969) report that state building has been particularly difficult in Mozambique because of its lack of a unified national identity. The absence of a clear sense of nationhood makes Mozambique an interesting choice when examining how the modern state has intervened in the controversial and private realm of sexual and reproductive behaviour and choices. The country also provides an interesting case within which to examine how individuals and groups perceive and react to state intervention in sexual and reproductive health choices and behaviours; spheres of practice which hitherto have been subject to more traditional forms of authority, such as those exerted by family/community/society.

This book relies on fieldwork carried out prevalently in the urban areas of Maputo, Mozambique’s capital and the country’s most populous city. My focus on an extended urban setting in a country where the majority of the population lives in rural areas requires further elaboration. First, this work does not aim at providing generalisable information about young people across the country. It aims at discussing the implications of in-school pregnancy in a rapidly ‘modernising’ context. Although rural areas are also modernising, Maputo presented the best site, as its evolving social and economic conditions impact upon young people more than any other age group (Karlyn, 2005). Karlyn (p. 4) contends:

In Maputo, as elsewhere, changing social structures and the breakdown of the extended family has placed the responsibility for sex education on parents, despite strong cultural taboos against it. The controversy over how young people express their sexuality in Mozambique masks larger issues in intergenerational communication, with young people often viewing their parents as anti-modern traditionalists, increasing young people’s desire for independence and freedom.

Maputo is certainly a very interesting context, yet the implied dichotomy between tradition and modernity does not adequately frame individual behaviours and attitudes in relation to pregnancy and sexuality. Rather, instances of modernity and tradition interweave with one another, to the point that it would be of little use to try and distinguish one from the other.

Of particular relevance here is that in-school pregnancy provokes various conflicts, as Mr Aurelio, an anthropologist from the Universidade Pedagogica in Maputo suggests:

I think there are a number of different conflicts between the various meanings attached to pregnancy. At the level of the Ministry of Education (MINED) there is the decree you already know about, which considers pregnancies as crimes. As such, it penalises men, in the case they are known, and also girls who get pregnant. At the level of families and communities, pregnancies are valued and recognised through the institute of early marriage and also in the case of an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, things are not as bleak as they are institutionally. Among young people, there is yet another meaning, and that is linked to sex, pleasure and so forth. In this sense, there is a very harsh conflict between the perspective of the MINED, which does not value pregnancies, that of families, who do, and that of young people, that consider it as an individual right.

A study of in-school pregnancy allows the unpacking of a number of discourses, which are often connected to different regulatory frameworks that are not necessarily aligned with one another. For example, Zara’s experience (r...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Author’s note
• Acronyms
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Positioning in-school pregnancy
• 3 Time, space, and methods
• 4 Regulating in-school pregnancy
• 5 From schools to families
• 6 Interlude
• 7 Young people constructing identities
• 8 Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Decree 39/GM/2003
• Appendix 2: List of interviewees
• Index