Sex education could have made all the difference

Suzan Adong massages the black rusty arm of her chair, leans back and chats away during the morning with her friends at the Reproductive Health Unit (RHU), a health-cum-training centre in Apac district.

Three minutes later, she’s back to business, making a pillow case on her sewing machine. Five minutes later, a nurse shouts out, disturbing her concentration.

“Adong, come and get the medicines to give to your baby,” she says in Langi, the local language spoken by the region’s inhabitants.

This instruction, its plain message aside, serves to remind her that she is no longer the ordinary school-going child she once was. The thought that she’s now a teenage mom trying to continue her education at an alternative school reoccupies her mind. Adong enrolled for a six months course in Tailoring and Design in August this year, having dropped out of school two years earlier because of getting pregnant. Apart from Tailoring, the centre also offers reproductive health and literacy skills and gives counseling, mostly to the youth.

Adong at the RHU clinic which has incorporated a tailoring school for teenage-mother school dropouts.

Outside Adong’s study room, happy little faces of children running around the school premises rush past us. Such moments make her realize what an appalling mistake she made engaging in sex at the age of 16.

Life changed for the now 19 year old, who once harbored the ambitions of becoming a nurse, when she exchanged her body for promised school fees money.

“While I was in Primary seven at Arocha primary school, I was occasionally sent back home for uncompleted payments of school fees. However, there was this man who promised to pay Shs 15,000 for me each term if I slept with him. I gave in,” the smooth skinned, milky eyed lass says, catching her breath as if her heart was about to spring out of her chest. 

This man and Adoch were just village friends but on the day he proposed to pay her school fees, he held her hand and they headed to his home. And as they say, the rest is history.

The banner of myths was still flying high in her young mind. Her colleagues always joked that girls cannot get pregnant the first time they have sex or that they couldn’t get pregnant if they had a bath immediately afterwards.

Oblivious of what her parents’ reaction would be, she kept the ‘promise’ and events of the evening a secret.

Two months later, she felt that something was going on inside her. She had skipped her monthly periods and was starting to feel sick. Gradually, the five kilometre journey to school from Baradong village became a cumbersome task.

Later, her mother’s suspicion of her first born child being pregnant was confirmed after Adoch felt weak and sick, and upon checking her, the doctor declared that she was pregnant.

“I was chased from home and I went to stay with my aunt and my lover disappeared on learning that I was pregnant. I stopped going to school and I can’t stop thinking of what I would have become if I had struggled on without giving in to this lie!” she coyly says, staring at the dusty cement floor.

Adoch’s advice now is for schools and parents to teach the children the dangers of early sexual activity which she didn’t know much about then.

COST ON EDUCATION

The 2012 State of Uganda Population report reveals that parenthood is a leading cause of school dropout among teenage girls. It notes that 30 per cent of teenage girls cite pregnancy or parenthood as a reason for dropping out of high school.

Moreover, less than one per cent of young teen mothers (those who have a baby before 18) attain a university degree by 30 and this trend negatively impacts on their children’s education.

“Children of teen mothers are more likely to drop out of high school than those of mothers who give birth at a later age. In fact, only about two-thirds of children born to teen mothers earn elementary education compared to 80 per cent of children of later child bearers,” reads the report.

A teenage mother in Apac district admires her baby.

RATIONALE FOR SEX EDUCATION

Lack of sex education in schools has been identified as a major contributory factor to the high rate of teenage pregnancy. Joyce Ampumuza, the project officer at DSW (Deutsche Stiftung Weltbevölkerung), a German NGO, says many young people are getting misleading information from their peers because parents consider discussion about sex a taboo.

A 2008 research by the Guttmacher Institute on youths aged 12 to 14 years in Uganda shows that only 33.8 per cent of females and 22 per cent of males have received sexuality education in schools. Guttmacher is an American organisation that seeks to advance sexual and reproductive health through research, policy analysis and public education. Currently, the ministry of Education messages to pupils and students is largely focusing on abstinence.

Ampumuza says life skills such as communications and coping skills and sexual reproductive health rights need to be incorporated in schools to help reduce the children’s ignorance. This includes teaching children about the emotional aspects of sexual relationships, sexually transmitted infections, HIV/Aids and the consequences of becoming sexually active.

She adds that this should be done to dispel myths like those Adong had.

Her views are supported by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) country representative, Esperance Fundira who believes that information empowers young people with informative decision making choices.  

“When girls are educated and healthy, they are more likely to marry later, delay childbearing and gain productive or employable skills. We must therefore enforce existing laws and policies to ensure that no girl below 18 is allowed to get married,” Fundira argues.

One success story is that of Atar primary school in Apac that has a project dubbed ‘family initiative’ where teachers and parents organize monthly counseling sessions for the pupils.

Francis Lagmuht, a teacher at the school, says the initiative has registered success this year as no dropouts due to early pregnancy have been recorded compared to four cases last year. 

Girls clad in T-shirts with messages that are aimed at encouraging them to keep in school.

Elsewhere, the Netherlands, where sex education begins at preschool and is integrated into all levels and subjects of schooling, boasts of having one of the lowest teen birth rates in the world at 5.3 per 1,000 women aged 15 to 19 (2011 UNAIDS report).

DOUBLE MINISTRY EFFORT

The ministry of Health has partnered with the ministry of Education to draft a policy on school health with a special focus on re-enrolling adolescent ‘mother’ dropouts back into school.

 “We intend to work with the Education Ministry to ensure that we identify girls who have dropped out of school because of early pregnancy to re-enrol so that they are empowered with knowledge and life skills,” the acting head for Reproductive Health Services, in the ministry of Health, Dr Collins Tusingwiire says.

In the ongoing efforts between the two ministries, the state minister for Primary Health Care, Sarah Opendi, says there is a review of the lower school curriculum to incorporate adolescent-friendly health information in schools.

There is also support of parent peer programmes for adolescent and reproductive health and training of peer educators to provide this information in schools.