SUPPORTING TEENAGE PREGNANCY WITHOUT PREJUDICE OR JUDGEMENT - MALKIA FOUNDATION

Deep in rural Western Kenya, Vihiga County lies Malkia Foundation , a community driven organization founded in the year 2002 with the sole mission of helping make the lives of disadvantaged / vulnerable girls and women in the community better by empowering them with education and skills for enterprise development. It is through this program that the founder – Phionah Musumba found that most of the girls coming to her were teenage girls who got pregnant. Having experienced early marriage at the tender age of 17 and dropped out of form 3 due to poverty and lack of school fees, Phionah sincerely understands the quagmire the girls are facing when they come to her. Phionah went back to school after 5 years as a private candidate while simultaneously being a mother and a worker. In reclaiming her destiny and her story, she passed her exams and felt that she never wanted any young girl to experience the same and Malkia Foundation was born.

When teenage pregnant girls come to Phionah, they usually have more or less the same story. They indulged in sexual intercourse and noticed they were expectant after 2 or 3 months. They did not expect the pregnancy. They did not fathom they would get pregnant. Why? We ask…. They simply say, they did not know the repercussions. Most say they knew about the outcomes of unprotected sex but they did not think it would happen to them. Many are duped by male statements like “you cannot get pregnant on the first try” Or “he had taken some ` medicine` that would prevent her from conceiving”. Some simply felt they did not have the power or agency to question the man because the cultural structures of patriarchy placed men in an exalted position of power that made them afraid of asking questions. In some cases, the girls wanted to feel loved and wanted. Vulnerable girls were seeking love and affection and more often than not, these fake displays of affection gave them the temporary feeling of being wanted and valued.

According to Phionah, a high percentage of men or boys who impregnant teenage girls want nothing to do with them after learning they are pregnant. They prey on their naivety to get easily accessible sex without the accountability that comes with having intercourse. Many of these men are usually married with families. As such, they do not want any further `complications` to their family life. It has been noted that the wives of such men are the first to condemn such girls. They can even lead a delegation of women to mock and ridicule her for attempting to `break` a home. In addition, most mothers, having gone through the pain experience of being cheated on feels like the daughter has brought shame upon her as the traditional setting indicates that mothers are the custodian of their daughters. Such mothers may even chase away the daughters from their home. In this case, such girls run to the only solace they can find, community driven organizations like Malkia Foundation.

At Malkia Foundation, the girls are welcomed without prejudice or judgement. They are not questioned for their decisions or lack of knowledge. Instead, they are trained for 7 weeks on financial literature skills and business operation skills. This is because with a baby coming, they first have to establish a source of income that gives them independence. This is usually against the backdrop of rejection from both their boyfriends and their families who also refuse to continue paying school fees. They are given a seed capital of 30USD after the training to start small scale businesses like selling second hand clothes or selling food or merchandise by the roadside.  Malkia measures success by counting the number of girls who are able to go back to secondary school and complete their education. The girls have learnt to be each others support system aping the mantra, if not us then who? They have created their own day care system where they take turns in taking care of each other’s children when one has to go in for classes or run a business errand.

Malkia Foundation has one MAJOR condition for getting into the training program and into their center. One MUST commit to going back to school; whether formal or informal education because in this region, education is the ultimate equalizer. When is harshly taken away from them, it creates a generation of hopeless, dependent and economically unproductive single mothers and is a narrative Malkia Foundations is fight hard to change.

As a society, we must change the narrative. We must call sex with teenagers what exactly it is – RAPE! We must create awareness amongst both girls, mother and women in the community. We must be deliberate in educating each other on how to avoid sex as a teenager and how to handle it in the case that it occurs. When women are at the fore front of condemning teenage girls for their pregnancies, then the whole society automatically justifies its reaction to excommunicate the girl for the ` crime` of falling pregnant. In deed the suppositions made in this blog are controversial, but can we talk about it?

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