Independent SA
by Columbus Mavhunga
29 August 2010
Zimbabwe’s government has been forced to fend off charges that it is encouraging teen sex after deciding to grant parental leave to pregnant schoolgirls and soon-to-be dads.
The education ministry of Zimbabwe’s power-sharing government last week announced that young girls who fall pregnant during the course of their studies will no longer face automatic expulsion from school.
Instead, they will be given three months’ leave and allowed to resume their studies shortly after giving birth.
Student nurses, who also faced the same sanction, will also be allowed pick up where they left off.
The move brings Zimbabwe in line with other countries in the region, including South Africa and Namibia, which try to accommodate rather than stigmatize teen moms.
Zimbabwe goes one further by also giving the boy who fathered the child three months’ leave, to encourage them to support the mother.
However, the development has not gone down well with conservative groups such as Tsika Dzedu (Our Culture), which conducts programmes in schools to teach Zimbabweans about their culture.
“It is taboo to allow such absurdity,” Muchineripi Marere, the group’s head, railed. “It is unmentionable in African culture to allow girls to get pregnant, let alone promote it.”
The government retorts that it is a matter of common sense.
“I think we have been punishing our children, who in most cases would have fallen pregnant because of a lack of knowledge of the hazards of what they are doing,” Minister of Education David Coltart told the German Press Agency dpa.
“I know we have received a bashing on this. But I think we are just being realistic. Teenage pregnancy happens and we can’t run away from that situation. Expelling them is retrogressive as it promotes illiteracy, something which we, as a government, are totally against.”
Intellectuals and parents of pregnant teenagers have applauded the move.
“It never made sense that in Zimbabwe, the girl who fell pregnant was expelled while the boy who made her pregnant remained in school to finish his education,” Zimbabwe’s Petina Gappah, author of the acclaimed short story collection An Elegy for Easterly, wrote on social network website Facebook.
“Here again, the government of Zimbabwe shows that, where it chooses to be, it can be progressive. More of the same please!”
A mother who saw her daughter’s dreams of a good job dashed when she was expelled from school took the same view.
After giving birth Rutendo Nyamasvisva moved to neighbouring Botswana in search of “piece jobs” or casual labour.
“If she had finished her school, I am sure she would be a teacher or a lawyer,” Anna Nyamasvisva told dpa.
“Now even her child might not be able to finish school because my daughter is not earning a lot of money,” Nyamasvisva, who works as a clerk in a courier company in Harare, complained.
There are no statistics available on the number of girls who fall pregnant in this conservative country of 12 million people, whose education system was the envy of Africa before President Robert Mugabe’s policies plunged the country into severe economic decline, between 2000 and 2008.
A headmaster at a public girl’s school in Harare said they had up to two pregnancies a year, out of 700 pupils.