High Rate of Teenage Pregnancy in Uganda –ARE SCHOOLS TO BLAME? by Ddungu Ronald, Gayaza High School

Introduction:
Today 25% of the girls are getting pregnant during their teen ages (Uganda Population Secretariat, 2011) before the anticipated 18 years of maturity as designated within the Ugandan constitution. The greater part of these have had some level of education but others have not had chance to go to school. A UNESCO report (2011) shows that almost 50% of the girls drop out of school before they complete the primary cycle of education in Uganda and that this is the highest school dropout rate for females in East Africa.

The reasons attributed to this include; lack of interest, pregnancy, early marriages, hidden costs at school and family responsibilities. When a girl drops out of school, sexual exploitation and abuse is the most likely scenario and once she gives birth it becomes increasingly difficult to be allowed back in school as a child mother unlike the boy who may be responsible for the pregnancy in this case. So the question at hand is “Is our education system helping or fueling this crisis and what should schools be doing to avert this situation?”

I strongly believe that the solutions to the challenges faced by the girls while growing up including those mentioned above lie more within the confines of the school taking into account the approach to the implementation of the education curriculum and the empowerment given to the girls as they go up the ladder of education.

The Education System in Uganda.

In Uganda today, all children of primary going age are expected to be at school to benefit from the Universal Primary Education (UPE) program and many parents are happy that the government has provided for this.

The main objectives of the UPE program include:

• To provide the facilities and resources to enable every child to enter and remain in school until the primary cycle of education is complete;
• To make education equitable in order to eliminate disparities and inequalities;
• To ensure that education is affordable by the majority of Ugandans;
• To reduce poverty by equipping every individual with basic skills.

Thus our schools are expected to provide an education that safeguards girls up to the required age of marriage and the longer a girl stays at school, the better for her future. An educated woman becomes pivotal to the success of her family and plays a part in the development of her nation. While a lot of emphasis is being put on the legislation of punitive laws to those who lead the girls into teenage pregnancies, I strongly feel that little has been done in reshaping the school system to empower the children for this fight.

The School curriculum:
The curriculum followed by our Uganda schools today has been condemned to be detached from the needs of our societies including sexuality education and some children including their parents see no reason to stay at school and yet the children can act as a source of labour at home. The curriculum is exam oriented and many teachers are using the chalk and talk method of teaching which makes the content taught hard to learn and at times too much punishment has taken centre stage within our schools as a remedial action. Hence many children lose interest in school at a very early age and just keep in school because they must and look for an opportunity to jump out whenever they can. The children stay at school for almost 9 months a year and return home without any skill that they can use to contribute to the financial sustainability of the home. So when the family is financially bankrupt or the children are bored of being in school then the children are pulled out of school by their parents willingly or otherwise to remain home and support the activities that can bring in some income. Unfortunately some of these activities that the children engage in such as; road side businesses or working in some one’s home to earn a living both for self and the family make the children prone to early sex endeavours and hence early pregnancies. Other children are quickly married off such that they bring in dowry and all the anticipated extended support systems from the lucrative husband as may be imagined.

Some teachers have tended to be rude and hard to the students as a means of delivery of their work and this continues to scare the children and thus do whatever is possible to be out of school. The discipline of children who hate school greatly declines and some become bullies while many girls engage in early sex talks with the boys which affects their academic performance and at times when requested to repeat a class, the parents withdraw the child from school. Such students tend to be loud in school and at times influence their friends to follow their footsteps and even cause some of their friends to drop out of school. On the other hand reports indicate that the teachers themselves have tended to befriend the children and lure them into early sex as a favour to be liked by the teacher. All this points to the need of reshaping the education system and provide a better approach to the delivery of the curriculum that empowers the children with skills but also that makes the teachers better role models.

Reshaping our schools and the delivery of the curriculum.

When you mention change of the curriculum in Ugandan schools to include sexuality education and other related fields as the ultimate strategy for reduction of teenage pregnancies, one wonders whether it is a practical solution. However whatever the curriculum design you may have, the method of implementation of the curriculum will either make it a relevant curriculum to the needs of its people or not.

When we state that the Ugandan curriculum is not appropriate because it is exam oriented we refer to the method of evaluation employed within the delivery structures of the curriculum. The teachers in our schools have tended to focus on the evaluation demands of their work and not the relevancy of their teaching to the way of living of their students and the communities they represent. I strongly believe that the curriculum is good but the way we deliver it is what lacks.

I must say that the teachers’ way of implementation of the curriculum has done more harm in increasing the school dropout rate for the girls than the nature of the curriculum itself. The engagement of the students in activities outside the classroom is nonexistent in most schools and what we observe most is sitting in rows and columns within the four walled classrooms which is the first hitch that has hit the education system in Uganda. In most cases the students only step out of their classes with the teacher when on punishment and on other occasions when they are playing during lunch break un supervised. Yet the students can learn through activities within the school compound or can even use the community grounds outside school. The experiences of the community members can be explored and put to good use within a given curriculum area. Whenever students are allowed to use all their senses within a classroom activity, they tend to enjoy it, learn it better and replicate it easily later on while at home to th
the amusement of their guardians. Once the parents see value in having their daughter at school then they will do whatever it takes to keep her in school. This new approach to learning that needs to be common in our schools is called Project- based learning.

Project-based learning:

The use of project- based learning requires the teacher to engage the students in identifying a real life problem and make it central to the students’ learning. The students would speak about the problem, critically analyse the context in which this is considered a problem, debate as a class about the solutions and strategies of solving the problem and how they are going to communicate their findings. It is purely a student centred approach where the teacher acts as a facilitator to support the children in discovering new knowledge. The class might draw some learning from the community members in order to fully understand the problem and seek to know the extent to which the problem has been solved and by whom. All this would enable the students to enjoy their classroom work and enjoy school but also have some real time information to give as feedback at home that might be very helpful to the development of the home. In such a class or school, students will be able to develop skills such as ; creativity, team work, problem solving, communication, assertiveness, leadership, critical thinking, self-confidence, taking initiative, use of ICTs, negotiation, setting goals, project management, entrepreneurship, autonomy, time management and keeping deadlines. These are the survival skills that are needed by everybody and could go a long way in empowering the girls and keep them away from early pregnancies but need to be developed early at school. These skills would empower the girls to speak out when faced with a problem and be able to negotiate their way when cornered in situations that would rather lead them into early pregnancies.

Whether the subject is sexuality education like has been fronted for our schools or mathematics education, the method of approach to learning needs to follow a project- based learning format in order to instill the required survival skills.

However, the teachers were not taught using project- based learning and urgently need to be trained in teaching using project-based learning as a method of teaching. In some schools, effort is being made to introduce project-based learning by some teachers which has not been scaled out because it is not a requirement for evaluation of the curriculum. The reports from these schools indicate that the students enjoy this type of learning, the teachers find the method helpful in equipping the children with a wide variety of skills and the parents become more satisfied with the learning that their children receive while at school. Children in such schools develop great interest in school activities and would stay longer at school but also acquire a number of survival skills that would enable them to avoid circumstances that would otherwise keep them out of school. Some of the projects teach the children entrepreneurial skills and this could enable them start simple businesses that can improve on the financial sustainability of the school and their homesteads.

These pioneer teachers need to be supported to improve on their work and get it documented to provide realistic examples to the other teachers in a quest to improve on the delivery of the curriculum so as to reduce on the school dropout rate in Uganda. While this method of teaching is common to other education systems, Uganda needs to develop its own case studies that could bench mark scenarios from other countries but mapped on our own curriculum and tested in schools. Teachers who teach with the project-based learning approach end up as great project managers and this gives them room to start businesses outside their usual classroom work. This again makes them very good role models to students and through this they pass on better survival skills to their own students.