May 26, 2022 • 21 mins
An increase in teen pregnancies in Kenya is part of a shadow pandemic that ripped through developing nations during Covid, setting women’s progress back generations. In this episode of The Pay Check, journalist Jill Filipovic visits a dance school in Nairobi, Kenya that’s fighting to help girls manage their lives and re-enroll in school.
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Speaker 1 (00:12):
When Ka Kenya and Taia was growing up in a
Massai community in rural Kenya, it was rare for girls
like her to go to school beyond seventh grade. So
much has changed now. Growing up there was like like
it wasn't girls would go to school beyond primary school.
That was like, I'm pad of my best friend got
married when went sixth grade. A lot of my other
(00:34):
friends got to Maryland. They were in seventh grade and
by the time were in eighth grade, there was only
two girls. The boys used to tell us, what are
you still doing in this class? Ka Kenya stayed in
school because her mother pushed her too, and she eventually
got a scholarship to study at a university in the US.
She now runs her own ngeo Ka Kenya's Dream that
(00:57):
helps girls in her community stay in school and delay
marriage into adulthood. Because of organizations like hers and a
push from advocacy groups and the Kenyan government, girls enrollment
in secondary school has shut up. In the last years.
The rates of girls completing secondary school there have doubled,
(01:19):
according to data from the World Bank. That increases their
earning potential and the quality of their lives and their
children's lives. The country is well off when the women
are taken care of, and that woman starts from that
little girl, who you need to support, who you need
to protect, who we need to God. Then the pandemic hit,
(01:40):
shutting down schools and programs like Kenya's Dream. Kenya feared
that the lockdowns would threaten all that progress. For the
first time, the guests were sent home and to stay
for a very long time without event knowing when they
will come back. There was good reason to worry eight
years ago when schools closed for months at a time
(02:02):
during the Ebola crisis in West Africa. Girls there got
off track, and one of the main culprits was a
spike in teen pregnancy rates, which made it hard for
many of them to finish school. When young girls have kids,
that has all sorts of knock on effects. They're less
likely to find financial stability, and their children are less
likely to complete their schooling too. In March, it looked
(02:26):
like Kenya was headed down that path. They went back
to the homes that were not prepared to have goals.
Especially for us, we had gay in high school or
poy in college. Yet there was one small but crucial
thing that could potentially give someone like Ka Kenya some
hope during the Ebola crisis. Researchers found that those who
(02:48):
had participated in community based programs like Ka Kenya's Dream
that were focused on empowerment and sexual health before things
shut down, they were less likely to get pregnant during
lockdown and more likely to return to school when restrictions
were lifted. The pandemic would almost certainly set girls and
Kenya back. But is it possible because of people like
(03:10):
Kenya that they can recover just as quickly? Dobless claims
coming in, I mean really jumping from the week before,
pretty brutal. Three point to million records. Six point six
million Americans filed for unemployment last week and didn't working
women were the worst infected by the pandemic. We believe
(03:31):
that we are in facting one girl, one family, one village,
one country at the time. Well, now to the billionaire boom.
According to Bloombird, super yacht charters are up over three
d and a billionaire was created every twenty six I
was during this pandemic. No, I'm not waiting in line
(03:52):
for a COVID test with the public gross. It is
time for a wealth tax in America. We'll come back
to the paycheck. I'm Rebecca Greenfield. One of the good
news stories in the recent history of wealth inequality is
that globally, the gap between the richest and the poorest
(04:15):
has been closing. There are a few reasons for that,
but a big one that has pulled millions out of
poverty has been the push in developing nations to educate
young girls. Only half of the world's girls were enrolled
in school, but within two decades that proportion has risen
to two thirds. In many countries, the education gap between
(04:36):
girls and boys has closed entirely. The benefits have been many.
A girl born today will live on average, eight years
longer than one born years ago. Women with a secondary
education are more likely to delay marriage and plan their family,
and less likely to be stuck in an abusive relationship
(04:57):
and poverty. The pandemic on four sinately has been a
setback reaching gender parity. Acquainting the World Economic Forum has
been set back by a generation. They said would take
about hundred years before the pandemic to reach under parity.
Now it's a generation on from that's about hundred and
thirty five years. That's Namil Ahmed a strategist at Oxfam International,
(05:17):
global poverty nonprofit. While we've seen women in many countries
face also this second pandemic of increased gender based violence,
of this mountain of care work, as ever that the
shock absorbers really of crisis. One place that has been
hit particularly hard is Kenya because of its high poverty
rate and fragile healthcare system. The country had one of
(05:37):
the harshest responses to the virus. Schools were closed through January.
There were curfews, travel bands, and area specific lockdowns that
helped keep infection rates low, but it resulted in greater
food and security, more domestic violence, and high unemployment. In
some ways, girls have felt it the hardest. Earlier this year,
(06:01):
journalist Jill Filipovic published a troubling story in Bloomberg Business
Week magazine. She profiled girls who had big dreams, but
they were struggling with new realities filled with more violence, hunger, poverty,
and sometimes new babies of their own to care for.
But the stories of their lives didn't end there. With
(06:22):
COVID restrictions lifting and the global economy inching its way
to recovery, we asked her to return to Kenya's capital
Nairobi to see how some of those girls were faring.
Now here she is with the story. Meet Esther, an
eighteen year old girl living in Nairobi. She had dreams
of becoming a newscaster, and before the pandemic she was
(06:43):
on track. She was in Form one, the equivalent of
ninth grade, and if she graduated in three years as planned,
she would have been the first girl in her family
to finish secondary school. We've changed Esther's name here to
protect her privacy. I want to become one delay Victoria Ubady,
like so many ancles like I feel so good when
(07:04):
they're just presenting, especially when they're talking English, like I
admire that. Like I want to make someone that can
give other people inspiration, tell them that I was like
this and they have walked through this darkest time, heaviest time,
and still today and strong and I'm able to love. Then,
(07:25):
the COVID lockdowns in March left Esther stuck at home
and out of school in a small, crowded house in
what can be a tough neighborhood. Estra's mother had never
been particularly stable, but the pandemic pushed her stress levels
to new highs, and she began badly abusing her daughter.
It wasn't so good for me and my mom at home.
(07:46):
Sometimes we didn't understand each other. We had quarrels over
small things. My mom chegged me away. She would send
me away off like great out of myself. So it
was like I was trying to look for safety players
we can be. Esther's mom eventually kicked her out of
the house. At night, Esther would sleep in a nearby forest,
(08:08):
armed up with her boyfriend. By the time Esther realized
she was pregnant, she was several months along. Her boyfriend
was unsupportive, denying the baby was his. He left Esther
alone to carry and raise their child, who she gave
birth to in November. I'm just tired. Every will just
go on crying, crying, crying, like I don't have anything
(08:30):
to do with my life. I just want to die.
Esther is far from an outlier. The u n f
p A, the United Nations Family Planning Arm, found that
a lack of access to contraceptives in low and middle
income countries during the pandemic resulted in one point for
a million unintended pregnancies. Well, pregnancies were already high among
(08:55):
girls and Kenya even before the pandemic. They shot up
for girls who were in second dairy school when COVID hit.
Compared to girls who sat for their final exams in nineteen,
those who were supposed to complete their schooling in were
twice as likely to become pregnant and three times as
likely to drop out of school entirely. But Esther also
(09:17):
had a stroke of luck. She lives in Cabara, a
large and vibrant low income neighborhood in Nairobi, and down
the road from her house is Project Alimu. Project Alimu
is a well regarded ballet school. It's cracked concrete walls
(09:39):
are painted in bright colors and hold up an uneven
tin roof. Inside, it's a festival of noise. The music
shifts from classical to afrobeats. Kids shriek and cackle, girls
flounced around, and the leggings and two twos. Esther isn't
(10:02):
a dancer, but at Project a Limu she found a
little help from Michael Michael Maya, I'm the founder of
Project to Lima, which is an after school program based
here in Cabra. So my main work is I teach dance,
but also I do a lot of mentorship and the
psyco social support to lots and lots of children in Cubra.
(10:23):
Michael plays a big role in his Caberra community project.
A Limu trains dozens of dancers and here students have
a safe space away from the stressors at home. When
they come to project. To Limu, they can get something
to eat, girls can find sanitary pads, and children who
come here have the chance to play, to be kids
and to hear that they're important. During the early days
(10:46):
of the pandemic, project a Limu had to shut down.
It's funding also dried up as donors redirected their money
to COVID relief. With COVID, it was so big because
the problem was the schools had all shut down, and
a lot of support that all these girls get comes
from their schooling and a lot of per education, a
(11:07):
lot of psycho social support, a lot of food for instance,
and then also just a place that they would just
be girls. In Kenya, schools are were most low income
kids get their most consistent meal of the day. Most
households like internet access, making online learning close to impossible,
and when schools closed, kids were thrust into difficult living
(11:27):
situations with parents who are out of work and highly stressed.
You know, when there's less money in a household, and
houses saw it growing up in my own family. When
there's less money and there's high demand of food, there's stress.
And when there is stress, it leads to violence because
we don't have other ways of handling our stress if
it's not violence, And so there was a lot of
(11:50):
domestic violence cases. There was also a lot of sexual
abuse and young girls. Many teenage girls like Esther found attention, food,
and financial support from adult man, but a few of
them had learned much about sexual health and pregnancy prevention,
not to mention sexual consent, and many of these relationships
were fundamentally imbalanced between adolescent girls who needed basics like
(12:14):
sanitary pads, a few dollars for food and shelter, and
adult men who could make sex the price tag. So
when the girls grew they never got that parent to
support from their parents because their parents were also young
adults at that time when they were born, so they
never got enough time to learn about for instances, sexual
(12:35):
education to get to understand how to keep themselves safe.
So you would find girls who are tricked into having
boyfriends at a very alle age, because then the boyfriends
would provide in majority of them. They see their moms
also stuck into relationships that are very toxic. So some
of the girls got pregnant unluckily, but we were able
(12:57):
to find a way in supporting the astro Found Refuge
and project a lever. Mike supported me from the time
when I was five months pregnant. He told me, it
is not the end. You have big rocks, you have
big mountains, and you're a human being. People do make mistake,
but it is the same time you have understand yourself
(13:19):
and you want to be given another chance to go
back to school. And you're not afraid because I'm here
to mentor you. I'm here to tell you need to
study when you don't have to be the same that
you are. You don't need to be cheated by boys again.
You need to understand no matter how hard the situation is,
you need to focus. You don't need to fight people
to make them understand you. Yes, I don't need to
(13:41):
fight with my mom to understand me because it is
my mistake and I need to correct my mistake by myself.
No one should judge me by my mistake. Because they
don't know my goodness. Like Michael, Florence mcgeary works with
(14:09):
adolescence in an informal Nairobi settlement. Along with some friends,
she founded the organization l E S, Lead, Educate and Succeed,
which provides local adolescent girls with information about sexual health,
pushes them to assert themselves and encourages them to dream
big for their futures. Since Corona had to strike like
(14:30):
the whole country, not only in Kenya, we saw that
it's nice to have a discussion with the young people
because those high rate of pregnancy in Kenya, because of
the idleness of the young people. I sat in on
a session Florence and her fellow educators held with some
two dozen girls about sexual health. Florence says parents are
(14:57):
grateful for her classes because kids are are always comfortable
talking to them about sex and parents aren't always comfortable
talking to their kids about sex either. They're not going
to school and all the people that are taking advantage
of them of their naivety, and then it was there
was cassity of food, the parents were not working, so
(15:18):
it was like kind of kills, but it's quiet kills. Now.
Schools and community programs are open again, but many adults
don't have their jobs back or badly in debt, which
means they can't afford to pay the school fees that
are a fixture in many African countries, and we're a
barrier to education even before the pandemic. There's so many
family school not of food. And the good thing is
(15:41):
that the government was like, no, you need to open
up the school for every kid to come. That was
the case for Evelyn, who I met last year and
then caught up with again on my recent trip to Kenya.
Evelyn lost her job in March and still hasn't returned
to a formal workplace, although she does small jobs around
her neighborhood to make ends meet. When COVID hit shutdowns
(16:03):
closed school for her two kids, ten year old Blessing
and six year old Miguel, Evelyn did her best to
teach them at home, going over the alphabet with Miguel
and quizzing Blessing on her English. When schools finally reopened
in January one, though Evelyn still wasn't back to work
and didn't have the money to pay for her kids
to re enroll. She takes home roughly nine d Kenyan
(16:25):
shillings a week, which amounts to less than eight U
S dollars, not enough to cover school fees. It hurt,
but since I didn't have that cash to take them
back to school. Luckily, the schools let her kids come back.
Even though Evelyn was still in arrears. Back in school,
Blessing is excelling. She had the highest marks in her
class this term. Evelyn, who dropped out of high school
(16:48):
after getting pregnant, wants her daughter to go farther than
she did. Maybe, Evelyn says, Blessing will be a doctor someday.
You know, for me, I didn't reach that level. I
gave birth when I was informed too. So for my
kids I want them to to go higher than me
(17:12):
so that they can have a better future. For Blessing,
she's a great girl, so I can't afford to miss
with her life. And for girls who end up pregnant,
school fees aren't the only hurdle. Even though Kenyan law
entitles teenage mothers to an education, there's still a tremendous
(17:35):
stigma attached to youth pregnancy. A girl's parents may decide
not to pay for her schooling. She may not have
anyone to watch her child while she learns, and even
if she overcomes those challenges and gets into a classroom,
she may face bullying by her peers and even her teachers.
Some schools who are not fully embracing gods who have
given birth, there's a lot of stigma when you go
(17:58):
back to school as a young mother. They always talk
of people who just went out to have sex and
came back with babies. Instead of designing the school to
be a safe space for these girls, it became a
place that they did not feel comfortable. The result is
that girls who enter into motherhood early are subject to
(18:21):
the whims of the adults around them and are often
only able to complete their schooling if they're very lucky
and if they have someone with a little power advocating
for them. It gets so hard for them, so they
weren't out sometimes, but we try to encourage them as
much as we can to have them just back in school.
We decided to redesign our approach whereby if you were
(18:46):
unlucky and you got pregnant, we still embrace you as
one of us, and we were able to find help
for them. We find a way of getting proper medical
support and then also using the network within our parents,
because we have parents who how do you call them?
Community health volunteers and they're very good with pre natural
(19:09):
care and after you've given bath, they will help you.
After being out for a year, Esther is finally back
in school and helping to graduate. After that, she says
she wants to start her own business so she can
provide for herself and her son. For me, I see lights,
I see like I'm going to that moon that I wanted.
(19:30):
But now I feel so good because I have Mike
support and he told me to go back to school.
I feel so proud because it is like I'm making
a step, like I want to become that person that
I wanted to become in life. Make this said, know
that I don't need to prove them wrong. I need
to prove myself from that no matter what they did
to me, still able to raise my son on my
(19:52):
own and do a better job that can make my
family get out of this this place because it's not
a good list for all of us. This is a
crucial moment, not just for women and girls, but for
the well being of entire nations. National economies will grow
(20:16):
or shrink depending on women's ability to get an education,
work and plan their families. Next week on the Paycheck,
we had to a part of the world that's on
uptick and marriage during the pandemic. But it wasn't all
joyful celebrations, girls objective. Many of the girls that didn't
(20:36):
want it to get married. But when we try to
stop even the community people, they said, by you, people
are dropping, let it happen. Thanks for listening to The Paycheck.
If you like our show, please head on over to
Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts to rate,
review and subscribe. This episode was hosted by Me Rebecca
Greenfield and reported by a Jail Filipovic. It was edited
(21:00):
by Danielle Balbi with help from Francesca Levi, Janet Paskin
Rocksheeta Saluja and Me. We also had editing help from
Shelley Banjo, Kristin v. Brown, Gilda to Carly, Nicole Flato,
Elissa McDonald, and Kai Schultz. This episode was produced by
Gilda to Carly and sound engineered by Matt him. Our
original music is by Leo Sidron. Special thanks to Magnus Hendrickson,
(21:24):
Margaret Sutherland, Stacy Wong, and Aisha Diallo. Francesca Levi is
Bloomberg's head of podcasts. See you next week.
When Ka Kenya and Taia was growing up in a
Massai community in rural Kenya, it was rare for girls
like her to go to school beyond seventh grade. So
much has changed now. Growing up there was like like
it wasn't girls would go to school beyond primary school.
That was like, I'm pad of my best friend got
married when went sixth grade. A lot of my other
(00:34):
friends got to Maryland. They were in seventh grade and
by the time were in eighth grade, there was only
two girls. The boys used to tell us, what are
you still doing in this class? Ka Kenya stayed in
school because her mother pushed her too, and she eventually
got a scholarship to study at a university in the US.
She now runs her own ngeo Ka Kenya's Dream that
(00:57):
helps girls in her community stay in school and delay
marriage into adulthood. Because of organizations like hers and a
push from advocacy groups and the Kenyan government, girls enrollment
in secondary school has shut up. In the last years.
The rates of girls completing secondary school there have doubled,
(01:19):
according to data from the World Bank. That increases their
earning potential and the quality of their lives and their
children's lives. The country is well off when the women
are taken care of, and that woman starts from that
little girl, who you need to support, who you need
to protect, who we need to God. Then the pandemic hit,
(01:40):
shutting down schools and programs like Kenya's Dream. Kenya feared
that the lockdowns would threaten all that progress. For the
first time, the guests were sent home and to stay
for a very long time without event knowing when they
will come back. There was good reason to worry eight
years ago when schools closed for months at a time
(02:02):
during the Ebola crisis in West Africa. Girls there got
off track, and one of the main culprits was a
spike in teen pregnancy rates, which made it hard for
many of them to finish school. When young girls have kids,
that has all sorts of knock on effects. They're less
likely to find financial stability, and their children are less
likely to complete their schooling too. In March, it looked
(02:26):
like Kenya was headed down that path. They went back
to the homes that were not prepared to have goals.
Especially for us, we had gay in high school or
poy in college. Yet there was one small but crucial
thing that could potentially give someone like Ka Kenya some
hope during the Ebola crisis. Researchers found that those who
(02:48):
had participated in community based programs like Ka Kenya's Dream
that were focused on empowerment and sexual health before things
shut down, they were less likely to get pregnant during
lockdown and more likely to return to school when restrictions
were lifted. The pandemic would almost certainly set girls and
Kenya back. But is it possible because of people like
(03:10):
Kenya that they can recover just as quickly? Dobless claims
coming in, I mean really jumping from the week before,
pretty brutal. Three point to million records. Six point six
million Americans filed for unemployment last week and didn't working
women were the worst infected by the pandemic. We believe
(03:31):
that we are in facting one girl, one family, one village,
one country at the time. Well, now to the billionaire boom.
According to Bloombird, super yacht charters are up over three
d and a billionaire was created every twenty six I
was during this pandemic. No, I'm not waiting in line
(03:52):
for a COVID test with the public gross. It is
time for a wealth tax in America. We'll come back
to the paycheck. I'm Rebecca Greenfield. One of the good
news stories in the recent history of wealth inequality is
that globally, the gap between the richest and the poorest
(04:15):
has been closing. There are a few reasons for that,
but a big one that has pulled millions out of
poverty has been the push in developing nations to educate
young girls. Only half of the world's girls were enrolled
in school, but within two decades that proportion has risen
to two thirds. In many countries, the education gap between
(04:36):
girls and boys has closed entirely. The benefits have been many.
A girl born today will live on average, eight years
longer than one born years ago. Women with a secondary
education are more likely to delay marriage and plan their family,
and less likely to be stuck in an abusive relationship
(04:57):
and poverty. The pandemic on four sinately has been a
setback reaching gender parity. Acquainting the World Economic Forum has
been set back by a generation. They said would take
about hundred years before the pandemic to reach under parity.
Now it's a generation on from that's about hundred and
thirty five years. That's Namil Ahmed a strategist at Oxfam International,
(05:17):
global poverty nonprofit. While we've seen women in many countries
face also this second pandemic of increased gender based violence,
of this mountain of care work, as ever that the
shock absorbers really of crisis. One place that has been
hit particularly hard is Kenya because of its high poverty
rate and fragile healthcare system. The country had one of
(05:37):
the harshest responses to the virus. Schools were closed through January.
There were curfews, travel bands, and area specific lockdowns that
helped keep infection rates low, but it resulted in greater
food and security, more domestic violence, and high unemployment. In
some ways, girls have felt it the hardest. Earlier this year,
(06:01):
journalist Jill Filipovic published a troubling story in Bloomberg Business
Week magazine. She profiled girls who had big dreams, but
they were struggling with new realities filled with more violence, hunger, poverty,
and sometimes new babies of their own to care for.
But the stories of their lives didn't end there. With
(06:22):
COVID restrictions lifting and the global economy inching its way
to recovery, we asked her to return to Kenya's capital
Nairobi to see how some of those girls were faring.
Now here she is with the story. Meet Esther, an
eighteen year old girl living in Nairobi. She had dreams
of becoming a newscaster, and before the pandemic she was
(06:43):
on track. She was in Form one, the equivalent of
ninth grade, and if she graduated in three years as planned,
she would have been the first girl in her family
to finish secondary school. We've changed Esther's name here to
protect her privacy. I want to become one delay Victoria Ubady,
like so many ancles like I feel so good when
(07:04):
they're just presenting, especially when they're talking English, like I
admire that. Like I want to make someone that can
give other people inspiration, tell them that I was like
this and they have walked through this darkest time, heaviest time,
and still today and strong and I'm able to love. Then,
(07:25):
the COVID lockdowns in March left Esther stuck at home
and out of school in a small, crowded house in
what can be a tough neighborhood. Estra's mother had never
been particularly stable, but the pandemic pushed her stress levels
to new highs, and she began badly abusing her daughter.
It wasn't so good for me and my mom at home.
(07:46):
Sometimes we didn't understand each other. We had quarrels over
small things. My mom chegged me away. She would send
me away off like great out of myself. So it
was like I was trying to look for safety players
we can be. Esther's mom eventually kicked her out of
the house. At night, Esther would sleep in a nearby forest,
(08:08):
armed up with her boyfriend. By the time Esther realized
she was pregnant, she was several months along. Her boyfriend
was unsupportive, denying the baby was his. He left Esther
alone to carry and raise their child, who she gave
birth to in November. I'm just tired. Every will just
go on crying, crying, crying, like I don't have anything
(08:30):
to do with my life. I just want to die.
Esther is far from an outlier. The u n f
p A, the United Nations Family Planning Arm, found that
a lack of access to contraceptives in low and middle
income countries during the pandemic resulted in one point for
a million unintended pregnancies. Well, pregnancies were already high among
(08:55):
girls and Kenya even before the pandemic. They shot up
for girls who were in second dairy school when COVID hit.
Compared to girls who sat for their final exams in nineteen,
those who were supposed to complete their schooling in were
twice as likely to become pregnant and three times as
likely to drop out of school entirely. But Esther also
(09:17):
had a stroke of luck. She lives in Cabara, a
large and vibrant low income neighborhood in Nairobi, and down
the road from her house is Project Alimu. Project Alimu
is a well regarded ballet school. It's cracked concrete walls
(09:39):
are painted in bright colors and hold up an uneven
tin roof. Inside, it's a festival of noise. The music
shifts from classical to afrobeats. Kids shriek and cackle, girls
flounced around, and the leggings and two twos. Esther isn't
(10:02):
a dancer, but at Project a Limu she found a
little help from Michael Michael Maya, I'm the founder of
Project to Lima, which is an after school program based
here in Cabra. So my main work is I teach dance,
but also I do a lot of mentorship and the
psyco social support to lots and lots of children in Cubra.
(10:23):
Michael plays a big role in his Caberra community project.
A Limu trains dozens of dancers and here students have
a safe space away from the stressors at home. When
they come to project. To Limu, they can get something
to eat, girls can find sanitary pads, and children who
come here have the chance to play, to be kids
and to hear that they're important. During the early days
(10:46):
of the pandemic, project a Limu had to shut down.
It's funding also dried up as donors redirected their money
to COVID relief. With COVID, it was so big because
the problem was the schools had all shut down, and
a lot of support that all these girls get comes
from their schooling and a lot of per education, a
(11:07):
lot of psycho social support, a lot of food for instance,
and then also just a place that they would just
be girls. In Kenya, schools are were most low income
kids get their most consistent meal of the day. Most
households like internet access, making online learning close to impossible,
and when schools closed, kids were thrust into difficult living
(11:27):
situations with parents who are out of work and highly stressed.
You know, when there's less money in a household, and
houses saw it growing up in my own family. When
there's less money and there's high demand of food, there's stress.
And when there is stress, it leads to violence because
we don't have other ways of handling our stress if
it's not violence, And so there was a lot of
(11:50):
domestic violence cases. There was also a lot of sexual
abuse and young girls. Many teenage girls like Esther found attention, food,
and financial support from adult man, but a few of
them had learned much about sexual health and pregnancy prevention,
not to mention sexual consent, and many of these relationships
were fundamentally imbalanced between adolescent girls who needed basics like
(12:14):
sanitary pads, a few dollars for food and shelter, and
adult men who could make sex the price tag. So
when the girls grew they never got that parent to
support from their parents because their parents were also young
adults at that time when they were born, so they
never got enough time to learn about for instances, sexual
(12:35):
education to get to understand how to keep themselves safe.
So you would find girls who are tricked into having
boyfriends at a very alle age, because then the boyfriends
would provide in majority of them. They see their moms
also stuck into relationships that are very toxic. So some
of the girls got pregnant unluckily, but we were able
(12:57):
to find a way in supporting the astro Found Refuge
and project a lever. Mike supported me from the time
when I was five months pregnant. He told me, it
is not the end. You have big rocks, you have
big mountains, and you're a human being. People do make mistake,
but it is the same time you have understand yourself
(13:19):
and you want to be given another chance to go
back to school. And you're not afraid because I'm here
to mentor you. I'm here to tell you need to
study when you don't have to be the same that
you are. You don't need to be cheated by boys again.
You need to understand no matter how hard the situation is,
you need to focus. You don't need to fight people
to make them understand you. Yes, I don't need to
(13:41):
fight with my mom to understand me because it is
my mistake and I need to correct my mistake by myself.
No one should judge me by my mistake. Because they
don't know my goodness. Like Michael, Florence mcgeary works with
(14:09):
adolescence in an informal Nairobi settlement. Along with some friends,
she founded the organization l E S, Lead, Educate and Succeed,
which provides local adolescent girls with information about sexual health,
pushes them to assert themselves and encourages them to dream
big for their futures. Since Corona had to strike like
(14:30):
the whole country, not only in Kenya, we saw that
it's nice to have a discussion with the young people
because those high rate of pregnancy in Kenya, because of
the idleness of the young people. I sat in on
a session Florence and her fellow educators held with some
two dozen girls about sexual health. Florence says parents are
(14:57):
grateful for her classes because kids are are always comfortable
talking to them about sex and parents aren't always comfortable
talking to their kids about sex either. They're not going
to school and all the people that are taking advantage
of them of their naivety, and then it was there
was cassity of food, the parents were not working, so
(15:18):
it was like kind of kills, but it's quiet kills. Now.
Schools and community programs are open again, but many adults
don't have their jobs back or badly in debt, which
means they can't afford to pay the school fees that
are a fixture in many African countries, and we're a
barrier to education even before the pandemic. There's so many
family school not of food. And the good thing is
(15:41):
that the government was like, no, you need to open
up the school for every kid to come. That was
the case for Evelyn, who I met last year and
then caught up with again on my recent trip to Kenya.
Evelyn lost her job in March and still hasn't returned
to a formal workplace, although she does small jobs around
her neighborhood to make ends meet. When COVID hit shutdowns
(16:03):
closed school for her two kids, ten year old Blessing
and six year old Miguel, Evelyn did her best to
teach them at home, going over the alphabet with Miguel
and quizzing Blessing on her English. When schools finally reopened
in January one, though Evelyn still wasn't back to work
and didn't have the money to pay for her kids
to re enroll. She takes home roughly nine d Kenyan
(16:25):
shillings a week, which amounts to less than eight U
S dollars, not enough to cover school fees. It hurt,
but since I didn't have that cash to take them
back to school. Luckily, the schools let her kids come back.
Even though Evelyn was still in arrears. Back in school,
Blessing is excelling. She had the highest marks in her
class this term. Evelyn, who dropped out of high school
(16:48):
after getting pregnant, wants her daughter to go farther than
she did. Maybe, Evelyn says, Blessing will be a doctor someday.
You know, for me, I didn't reach that level. I
gave birth when I was informed too. So for my
kids I want them to to go higher than me
(17:12):
so that they can have a better future. For Blessing,
she's a great girl, so I can't afford to miss
with her life. And for girls who end up pregnant,
school fees aren't the only hurdle. Even though Kenyan law
entitles teenage mothers to an education, there's still a tremendous
(17:35):
stigma attached to youth pregnancy. A girl's parents may decide
not to pay for her schooling. She may not have
anyone to watch her child while she learns, and even
if she overcomes those challenges and gets into a classroom,
she may face bullying by her peers and even her teachers.
Some schools who are not fully embracing gods who have
given birth, there's a lot of stigma when you go
(17:58):
back to school as a young mother. They always talk
of people who just went out to have sex and
came back with babies. Instead of designing the school to
be a safe space for these girls, it became a
place that they did not feel comfortable. The result is
that girls who enter into motherhood early are subject to
(18:21):
the whims of the adults around them and are often
only able to complete their schooling if they're very lucky
and if they have someone with a little power advocating
for them. It gets so hard for them, so they
weren't out sometimes, but we try to encourage them as
much as we can to have them just back in school.
We decided to redesign our approach whereby if you were
(18:46):
unlucky and you got pregnant, we still embrace you as
one of us, and we were able to find help
for them. We find a way of getting proper medical
support and then also using the network within our parents,
because we have parents who how do you call them?
Community health volunteers and they're very good with pre natural
(19:09):
care and after you've given bath, they will help you.
After being out for a year, Esther is finally back
in school and helping to graduate. After that, she says
she wants to start her own business so she can
provide for herself and her son. For me, I see lights,
I see like I'm going to that moon that I wanted.
(19:30):
But now I feel so good because I have Mike
support and he told me to go back to school.
I feel so proud because it is like I'm making
a step, like I want to become that person that
I wanted to become in life. Make this said, know
that I don't need to prove them wrong. I need
to prove myself from that no matter what they did
to me, still able to raise my son on my
(19:52):
own and do a better job that can make my
family get out of this this place because it's not
a good list for all of us. This is a
crucial moment, not just for women and girls, but for
the well being of entire nations. National economies will grow
(20:16):
or shrink depending on women's ability to get an education,
work and plan their families. Next week on the Paycheck,
we had to a part of the world that's on
uptick and marriage during the pandemic. But it wasn't all
joyful celebrations, girls objective. Many of the girls that didn't
(20:36):
want it to get married. But when we try to
stop even the community people, they said, by you, people
are dropping, let it happen. Thanks for listening to The Paycheck.
If you like our show, please head on over to
Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts to rate,
review and subscribe. This episode was hosted by Me Rebecca
Greenfield and reported by a Jail Filipovic. It was edited
(21:00):
by Danielle Balbi with help from Francesca Levi, Janet Paskin
Rocksheeta Saluja and Me. We also had editing help from
Shelley Banjo, Kristin v. Brown, Gilda to Carly, Nicole Flato,
Elissa McDonald, and Kai Schultz. This episode was produced by
Gilda to Carly and sound engineered by Matt him. Our
original music is by Leo Sidron. Special thanks to Magnus Hendrickson,
(21:24):
Margaret Sutherland, Stacy Wong, and Aisha Diallo. Francesca Levi is
Bloomberg's head of podcasts. See you next week.
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