25% Of Girls In Uganda Get Pregnant Before Hitting 17

By Shumi Sumaya

Just like Kenya, Uganda is struggling with teen pregnancy. It has emerged that 25 percent of girls in the Land of Matoke get pregnant before hitting the age of 17, half of them get married and continue getting babies through their 20s.

Dr. Jane Ruth Aceng Ocero, from the Ministry of Health in Uganda, says that the country has the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in Sub-Saharan Africa with over 25 percent pregnancies among teenagers registered every year.

The biological onset of adolescence brings not only changes to teenage girls’ bodies but also new vulnerabilities particularly in the areas of sexuality, marriage, and childbearing.

Child pregnancies increased to 25 percent as reflected in the recent Uganda Demographic Health Survey report. The report states that 24 percent of female teenagers are either pregnant or have given birth.

The question remains: who is responsible for this negative trend among teenagers? Are they defiled/abused, is it due to parental neglect or erosion of social values? Well, let’s get the answers from teenage mothers.

Read More: More Than 830 School Girls Found Pregnant In Nyandarua County

The story of Betty Namyalo’s mirrors the many challenges girls in Uganda go through. She got pregnant at the age of 15. The man who made her pregnant was 22. He took off as soon as he realized that she was expecting his child.

Afraid of the repercussions from her mother, Namyalo fled home and joined a group of girls who later introduced her to a better “survival method”-transactional sex. The pregnant teenager engaged in the sex trade for five months until she was physically assaulted and thrown out by her hostesses for ‘stealing their clients.’

“I became homeless and depressed. I stayed and ate from the streets until I was badly beaten by a rapist,” Namyalo explains.

In Kenya, things are no different. Data from Kenya Data and Health Survey (2014) show that 1 in every 5 girls between 15-19 years is either pregnant or already a mother.

As of 2019 latest statistics from the Global, Childhood Kenya has the third-highest teen pregnancy rates with 82 births per 1,000 births.

According to the United Nations Population Fund Report, Kenya has recorded 378, 397 adolescent and teenage pregnancies for girls aged 10-19 years between July 2016 and June 2017, specifically, 28, 932 girls aged 10-14 and 349,465 girls aged 15-19 became pregnant.