Teen pregnancy
Teenage pregnancy in Kenya has become a recurring national
crisis, and yet, when going to the ballot next year for the general elections,
if history repeats itself, it’s not going to appear in any presidential
manifesto. Instead, every few months,
the teenage pregnancy crisis usually hits the headlines as a new report
emerges, reporting the same old figures of one in five teenagers being
pregnant, or having been pregnant before the age of 18.
A moral panic ensues
and once in a while, some government officials are moved enough to give a
speech or two on the issue, but in the end, Kenyan children continue to suffer
from teenage pregnancies with barely any structural support, nor any meaningful
governance intervention to stop it from happening again the next year to an
even larger number of children.
Surprisingly, Kenya has built an elaborate policy
architecture on teenage issues including both national policies and global
initiatives, while systematically refusing to fund or enforce them. As Sulakshi
Ram from Open Global Rights says, “By not implementing the myriad of polices
that touch on ending teenage pregnancies, Kenya has violated the human rights
of adolescent girls across multiple domains”.
As the 2027 general election conversations take form, the
rule of law is shaping up to be a major voting issue that may see candidates
win or lose. Teenagers may not yet vote, but when voters ignore their needs at
the ballot box, the consequences are borne by families, the economy and the
country as a whole.
For years now, teenage pregnancies have been treated as a
moral value issue. A social deviancy. With blame and responsibility being
placed on the young children to abstain from sex until they attain 18 years. But
prayers, wishes and hopes do not prevent teenage pregnancies, good governance
does. With education being the single most decisive factor as to whether a
teenage girl suffers from a pregnancy or not before she is an adult. As USAWA
2026 report indicates, an out of school teenage girl is 12 times more likely to
suffer early pregnancy compared to her in-school counterpart.
When analyzing the KDHS reports over the years on matters
teenage pregnancies, a pattern begins to emerge. That despite Kenya shouldering
a high teenage pregnancy burden, the crisis is not evenly spread across the
counties. For years now, a girl born in Samburu has had a 50% likelihood of not
completing primary or secondary school education due to teenage pregnancy.
While a child born in Nyeri at the same time, only has a 5% chance of getting
pregnant before the age of 18 years. It is not that the Samburu Girl is more
promiscuous, but rather that the governance structures supposed to help prevent
teenage pregnancies are absent in her case. So, girls from poor rural areas,
poor urban areas, and ASAL regions suffer a disproportionate risk of teenage
pregnancies compared to their counterparts.
In 2025 alone, 235,938 cases of teenage pregnancies were
reported in the country, an increase from 2024. With the age group 10-14 years
old seeing the highest increase of 14.6%. Nairobi County led (14,291), followed
by Kakamega (11, 835), Narok (10,934), Bungoma (10,493), and Migori (8,663).
This has made Kenya be ranked among the top 40 countries worldwide with the
highest incidences of teenage pregnancies annually. Which is unfortunate
because of the negative life altering consequences that a pregnancy brings to a
child. Compared to adults, teenage mothers face higher risks of eclampsia,
puerperal endometritis and systemic infections among other issues. WHO also
identifies pregnancy and childbirth as the 2nd leading cause of death among
teenage girls.
Besides the physical toll that the pregnancy has on a child,
their mental health suffers as well. Teenage mothers tend to suffer from
depressive symptoms that persist into adulthood. These mental health challenges
are exacerbated by social stigma and poor economic conditions that made the
pregnancy more likely to happen in the first place. As if that is not enough
trouble, babies born to mothers under 20 years old face higher risks of low
birth weight, preterm delivery and severe neonatal conditions made worse by the
fact that most teenagers don’t reveal their pregnancies early enough for
comprehensive antenatal care.
Furthermore, only 50% of teenage mothers in Kenya return to
school. For the half that does not, they are bound to a lifetime of low paying
informal jobs, if any. This translates to less income over a lifetime.
According to a 2025 report by UNAIDS, the cost in lifetime earnings of dropping
out of school due to a pregnancy translate to US $149,333 per person. This then creates a cycle of poverty as a
child in a household headed by an adult without formal education is 10 times
more likely to be out of school, compared to another child in a household
headed by at least a degree holder.
On the national economic level, teenage pregnancies’
consequences cost Kenya over 0.81% of its GDP, which translates to over 140
billion shillings per year. This loss is as a result of dropping out of school,
reduced lifetime earnings and productivity, higher healthcare and social
protection costs and poorer health come for both young mothers and their
babies. In simple terms, Kenya will not end up like Singapore if it bleeds
billions annually through the easily preventable tragedy that is teenage
pregnancies.
This then begs the question, who is impregnating hundreds of
thousands of Kenyan children each year? A 2024 study by FAWE found that over
70% of teenage pregnancies in Kenya are perpetrated by the children’s own
relatives (fathers, uncles, grandfathers, brothers), their neighbours,
teachers, and even child marriages that should have been a thing of the past by
now. Of the remining less than 30% that reported boyfriends as the
impregnators, some of the boyfriends are in the same age group as the girls, while
the Economic Survey of 2026 reported that boys are more likely to have their
sexual debut or first sexual experience with girls within their age group or
younger, while girls are more likely to have boyfriends of over 18 years. In
essence, Kenya has a sexual violence crisis that’s destroying hundreds of
thousands of lives per year.
While Kenyan adults have access to a semblance of sexual and
reproductive health services, teenagers on the other hand face major legal,
social and policy hurdles. To begin with, abortion in Kenya is criminalized
except under very specific narrow legal exceptions. This has seen a majority of
Kenyan children carry their babies to term, despite most of them being products
of rape. Furthermore, access to
contraceptives to teenagers has been heavily contested by religious groups and
conservatives who claim that access to contraceptives for teenagers will lead
to promiscuity.
This is despite Kenya having a legal and policy framework
that addresses teenage pregnancy as a health, education, protection and
development issue. The constitution guarantees reproductive healthcare,
equality and children’s rights to health and education, while the Children’s
Act, Health Act and Sexual Offenses Act reinforce protection and access to care.
The national ASRH policy, reproductive health policy, school re-entry
guidelines and triple threat action plan, further require adolescent- friendly
services, pregnancy prevention, protection from sexual violence and continued
education for pregnant and parenting girls.
In fact, Kenya had set 2030 as its deadline for having
eliminated teenage pregnancies altogether. Instead, four years to that
deadline, teenage pregnancies continue to wreak havoc on Kenyan children, their
families and the economy at large.
Rates of teenage pregnancy are in many ways a measure of how
effectively a society protects its girls, keeps them in school and enables them
to exercise meaningful choices about their lives. Kenya’s continued high
teenage pregnancy rates is thus an indictment on the failure of the Kenyan
government to keep Kenyan children safe from sexual violence, provide them with
comprehensive sexual education, sexual and reproductive health services and
keep them in school.
One child left behind is one too many, more than 200,000
adolescent pregnancies every year is not merely reprehensible, it is a
dereliction of public duty and an indefensible failure of governance for which
political leaders must be held accountable.
Thus, going into the 2027 election, vying leaders should not
just claim that they are going to empower the girl child, an empty rhetoric by
itself. They should instead have actual measurable action points on how they
will tackle the teenage pregnancy crisis. Neither is this issue only for the
women representatives, any serious presidential candidate should have a
national numerical target by which they hope to reduce teenage pregnancies
annually. This should be accompanied by an adolescent sexual and reproductive
health budget, instead of lumping these children into general maternal health.
The manifestos should also have guaranteed adolescent friendly reproductive
health services.
Numbers don’t lie, if the abstinence message preached by
religious quarters worked, Kenya would have seen a significant reduction in
teenage pregnancy numbers instead of the annual increase. Thus, candidates vying for 2027 elections
should commit to reduce teenage pregnancies by prevention through information
rather than the abstinence rhetoric alone.
Given that a majority of teenage pregnancies are perpetrated
through sexual violence, their manifestos should make ending sexual violence a
part of the urgent teenage pregnancy response. School re-entry for the 50% of
teenage mothers who don’t go back to school should also be prioritized. There
should also be funded interventions aimed specifically at boys and men on
consent, responsible sexual behaviors, contraception, prevention of sexual
violence and accountability for the exploitation of children.
In the 2022 elections, none of the presidential candidates
tackled the teenage pregnancy issue in their manifestos. The gubernatorial
candidates, even in the most affected counties, also did not include any
strategies of how they would deal with the teenage pregnancy crisis in their backyards.
Is it any wonder then that there has been no dent in the teenage pregnancy
numbers from 2022 to date? They say only a fool repeats an action expecting
different results. As Kenyans, we need to act differently if we want a country
that’s safe for all children regardless of geographical area or poverty levels.
As we walk into the voting booths next year, for all our children’s sake, we
need to vote for only the candidates that have answered these questions
satisfactorily, “By how much will teenage pregnancy rates fall under your
administration? What percentage of the budget will you allocate to achieving
that reduction? And who will be accountable if you fail?”