Sierra Leone minister Sengeh (right): crime victims

Sarah didn’t know she was pregnant until teachers told her. In 2020, her state-run boarding school in Tanzania ordered tests for all the girls returning after a three-month closure caused by Covid-19. When her pregnancy was confirmed, she was expelled and sent home. She was less than two years from graduating.

Sarah is one of thousands of girls harmed each year by a law that compels schools to expel pupils accused of “an offence against morality”. These expulsions were celebrated by the country’s previous president John Magufuli, who declared: “After getting pregnant, you are done.” Magufuli died last year, perhaps of Covid. The government of his successor, Samia Suluhu Hassan, relented in November, saying it will let teenage mums resume their schooling.

Sub-Saharan Africa has almost double the world’s rate of teenage births. Only 40 percent of girls in the region in the 15-17 age group attend school, compared with 45 percent of boys. This is partly because of policies like the one Tanzania has abandoned. Such rules are self-defeating, since there’s a strong link between the number of years of schooling that girls complete and the number of babies they will subsequently have.

At least 30 African countries now protect the education rights of pregnant girls and young mothers, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW), a pressure group. Half a dozen have made progress in the past few years. New rules in Uganda, where about a third of girls marry before they turn 18, allow parents to report school principals who refuse to enrol young mothers. Mozambique and Zimbabwe have also made schooling easier for teenagers with children. The last two holdouts still expelling expectant teens are Equatorial Guinea and Togo.
The most celebrated recent reforms are in Sierra Leone. In early 2020, the government ended a ten-year ban on adolescent mothers attending normal school. A year later, it introduced a new policy — dubbed “radical inclusion” — that gives pregnant girls the right to remain in class until they give birth and allows them to return to lessons as soon as they wish. Local law considers girls who have sex before age 18 to be victims of a crime, says David Sengeh, the education minister. Forcing them to give up their schooling compounds the crime.

Many of these changes were ordered before the pandemic. But some 30 weeks of school closures in Africa have made them all the more essential. The Mo Ibrahim Foundation, an NGO, reckons the hiatus deprived pupils in 23 African countries of roughly an eighth of the learning they would typically receive in their entire time in school. That is all the more worrying because they do not receive as many as pupils elsewhere to begin with.

Governments have more to do. Few of them maintain policies as liberal as Sierra Leone’s. Uganda’s new guidelines require pregnant girls to leave school before their second trimester, for example, even if their right to return is much clearer than it was. But countries with enlightened rules often struggle to enforce them, says Elin Martinez of HRW. Principals, parents and village chiefs have to be on board. Sengeh says he still runs into activists, both male and female, who tell him the new policy on pregnancy is a big mistake.