By Jeff Mwangi
A lady giving birth at an early age before marriage is regarded as case of lack of discipline among many African countries. It is worse if the lady becomes pregnant while in school.
Some of these girls feel neglected by the society and most of them are unable to continue with their education making them live a life of poverty.
It’s due to this, I Choose Life-Africa in partnership with Kenya Redcross, SOS Children’s villages and Healthy Africa Empowered People with financial and technical support from UKAID through the department of International Development (DfID) have come up with a Sh300 million project called ‘Jielimishe Girls Education Challenge Project’.
The project aims to improve education outcomes to better life chances of 10,050 marginalized girls in Laikipia, Meru and Mombasa as a pilot project with Meru County alone having 2,991 young mothers joining school after giving birth. Lawi Imathiu Secondary School in Imenti North Sub County of Meru County is one of the 20 schools where the pilot project is taking place in Meru County.
Driving 5km from the school, we get to Ronogone area, Julian Kagwiria’s home. Kagwiria is one of the young mothers who returned back to class early last year at the said Lawi Imathiu Secondary School and she is in Form Three.
We met Kagwiria undertaking her house duties as usual from washing clothes, cooking and feeding her baby boy.
According to her, she dropped out of school while in Form Two due to domestic problem where her father who is a drunkard started abusing her mother making her mother to run away from home to Nairobi.
Kagwiria says she was left alone in Meru and due to financial strains she got pregnant after indulging herself into a relationship with a man for money.
Life became hard for her back in Meru and decided to travel to Nairobi where she joined her mother in one of the Nairobi slums.
She was then employed as a house-help for a short while as she was expectant. After giving birth and staying in Nairobi for 3 months she got information on Jielimishe project and became interested.
“I had to travel back to Meru where I approached the project staff who heard my cry becoming one of the beneficiaries and now am happy that am doing well in school”. Kagwiria says.
The young mother says she is working hard in school and hopes to join one of the medical training colleges to do nursing.
