Tanzania Expels Pregnant Girls From Schools

Scarcely more than a month ago I blogged about the President of Tanzania telling women that they should stop using birth control. Their job was to have babies and, presumably, not try to compete with men in society. Another approach to this extreme level of gender inequality is to expel girls from school if they become pregnant. CNN reports that:

It happens twice a year at Arusha Secondary School. Each one of the school's 800 female students is accompanied into a toilet and told to pee in a jar. Outside the cubicle, a teacher waits to make sure the samples are not swapped. The girls are taking compulsory pregnancy tests. And if they come back positive, the student is expelled immediately. The tests have been happening at this school, for students from grades eight and up, for three years.

Tanzania uses a morality clause in a 2002 education law to give schools the legal framework needed to expel students -- the practice originally dates back to the 1960s. The law has been more widely applied since President John Pombe Magufuli took office in 2015.

Last June, Magufuli, dubbed "The Bulldozer," went a step further, announcing that pregnant students would not be allowed to return to school after giving birth. "In my administration as the President no pregnant girl will go back to school... she has chosen that of kind life, let her take care of the child," he said at a public rally in 2017. His speech removed any discretion schools had over how they enforced the morality rule.

Expelling a pregnant girl from school sets her life on a different course than if she were able to continue her education even while having to care for her child. Furthermore, the schools do not teach sex education nor are contraceptives available. If her parents don't teach her about sex, the CNN writers suggest that many of these girls will not be aware that sexual intercourse can lead to pregnancy. So, if the whole idea is to scare girls into not getting pregnant while in school, a little bit of education along those lines would clearly be beneficial. In theory, any male who impregnates a schoolgirl could be sent to prison, but the CNN report does not indicate that this has ever happened.

The CNN report also summarizes the situation in Tanzania with respect to teenage pregnancies:

Around a quarter of Tanzanian girls aged between 15 and 19 are mothers or pregnant. Child marriage is still prevalent in the country -- 37% of women aged 20 to 24 having been married before they turned 18, according to official data from 2010, the latest available. More than a quarter of girls married before the age of 19 have husbands who are 10 or more years older, according to the same survey.

I should note that the 2010 data are not the most recent. The results of the 2015-16 DHS in Tanzania are available online at DHSProgram.com. Sadly, they show that teenage pregnancy has increased slightly since 2010, rather than declined.