Kirehe District counts 600 teenage pregnancies, victims still hide the culprits

Elias Hakizimana Jun 18, 2019Jun 18, 2019 0 Comments

By Elias Hakizimana.

Around 600 teenage girls were found pregnant in Kirehe District but the victims still hide criminals, the issue that hampers quality of education according to officials.

Speaking during the celebration of African child day on June 16,2019, Gerald Muzungu, the mayor of Kirehe district said that teenage pregnancy is still among the issues hindering children education in the district.

“We still have around 600 underage mothers in the district, we are trying to help them by educating them and following on criminals who impregnated them, so far we have found over 100 criminals and the most difficult problem we have is that children themselves do not report the culprits,” Muzungu said.

Child rights activists committed to help the district stand up against the problem.

Omar Tony Nsengumuremyi, the chairperson of Children’s Voice Today (CVT) operating in the area said that they will boost strategies to approach children so that they feel free to report the culprits.

“We use to be with children to respond to some of the challenges they have by hearing from them, most of the time children hide violence related cases but slow by slow they can reveal such problems or orient you where colleague-children are located to help them,” Nsengumuremyi noted.

Frank Muvunyi, AJPRODHO’s ‘uburere budahutaza’/safe education’s project officer in Kirehe district said that in partnership with Save the Children implement this project by training parents on how to approach children and advise them on sexual reproductive health and avoid unwanted pregnancies.

“We have not yet approached the pregnant and underage mothers but we conduct regular discussions with parents to boost advocacy in tackling the issue. So far, we have trained 1,200 and among them there are special teams who were trained to follow on that case,” Muvunyi said.

Safe education project operates in five sectors of the district such as Nyamugari, Kigarama, Mahama, Kirehe and Gatore.

**A child that represents others in CVT-Kirehe District addressing participants to the African Child Day**

Teenage pregnancies are among the threats to quality of education while only in 2017, over 17,000 teenagers had unwanted pregnancies across the country and many of them finally dropped out of school.

Approximately 95 percent of teenage pregnancies occur in developing countries with 36.4 million women becoming mothers before the age of 18.

Sub-Saharan Africa is believed to have the highest prevalence of teenage pregnancies in the world.