When giving second chance to a teenage mother is beneficial

By Sabir Musa
Memories of 2015 still remains fresh in the mind of 20-year-old Doris Wadiko, a Senior Three student of Oleba Seeds Secondary school in Maracha District, West Nile sub region. Doris was just 15-years old when she conceived that year, forcing her to drop out of school. Her parents shortly forced her to get married at a tender age.
“When I conceived, the situation at our family changed completely especially from my dad, he was angry and attempted to chase me away from home when I told them that am pregnant”, she recalls with tears rolling down her cheeks. “They called the clan members, asked me few questions and they immediately arranged for me to take them to the boy’s family after narrating what happened”.
Life was never the same for the new young “bride” as she lacked the basic necessities to run her new found home.  She soon escaped to look for an opportunity to work as a maid in Koboko District located in the North of West Nile sub region, bordering South Sudan. She was taken in by a woman who employed her as her maid. The woman’s husband later started making sexual advances, forcing her to return home at the dismay of her parents.
Doris gets second chance
Back home, she landed on an opportunity to be enrolled back to school by Amani Initiative, a local Non-Governmental Organization NGO, which gave her a second shot for school life.
Amanai Initiative is a local NGO established by a group of young people in Maracha District with its main focus on preventing and responding to Child Marriage and Teenage Pregnancy in West Nile sub region. 
She would later give birth and continue with her education with the help of the Initiative.
Recent cases
By December last year, an estimated 40,000 cases of teenage pregnancies were recorded from different districts of the region. This figure short-up during the prolonged Covid-19 lockdown imposed by government to control the spread of the virus that has now seen learners staying home for close to 2 years.
Yumbe District alone recorded 3,284 cases of teenage pregnancy as of August last year, statistics which have continued to worry local authorities on whether the girls will return to school after giving birth or when government will fully re-open learning institutions.
“The schools are closed, so you will not know whether these children will go back to school or not even some have decided to get married”, says Jamal Kiira, the Yumbe Assistant District Community Development Officer.
Yumbe is not the only district in West Nile with cases of high teenage pregnancies. Recent reports from different districts indicate 5,890 cases were reported in Zombo, over 529 in Moyo, 1,610 in Koboko between June 2020 and July 2021.
This worrying trend is bothering stakeholders in the region, with some wondering and asking how the quality and future of these girls will be if they don’t go back to school. This also follows a concern resulting from an independent study that only 2 out of 10 teenage mothers are given a second chance to continue with their education in West Nile region.
Situations in Sub Saharan Africa.
The combination of school closures due to COVID-19, and policies and practices in some countries across sub-Saharan Africa that do not allow pregnant girls or young mothers to continue their education, are putting many countries on a collision course in which an estimated one million girls in the region may not be allowed back into schools once they reopen.
Across sub-Saharan Africa, World Vision offices report a similar pattern. In Krachi West in Ghana, a project has reported an almost nine-fold increase in teen pregnancies during the lockdown. Between October 2018 and September 2019, World Vision projects in Lupembe in Malawi saw 33 child marriages and 4 teen pregnancies. In the ten months since, the same area has already seen 49 marriages and 7 pregnancies. About&nbsp