Minister asked if you take our pregnant daughter back to school, are you going to marry her?

The Deputy Minister of Primary and Secondary Education Angeline Gata yesterday told Parliament the dilemma her ministry is facing in trying to get pregnant girls back to school.

She said that when she and a group of partners working with her ministry tried to get a 13-year-old pregnant girl in Manicaland back to school, her parents refused. They asked her whether they were going to marry her if they sent her back to school.

Gata was responding to a question from Mutsa Murombedzi of Mashonaland West who wanted to know what the ministry was doing to rescue girls that fell pregnant while at school to get back.

“The Ministry has done so many initiatives,” she said. “If I may with your permission Mr. Speaker Sir give you an experience of what happened when we do our joint monitoring across our nation in all ten provinces. In this particular case, I was the one with the team with partners. This is the UNDP, the Child Protection Unit and the President’s Office, the Teachers Union and staff from office.

“We visited a school in Manicaland. Upon asking because while we were doing monitoring and evaluation, we asked the school headmaster to give us statistics if there were any dropouts at the school. He mentioned that he had two girls, 13-year-olds who dropped out because they were pregnant. We probed because in our Ministry, it is a policy that we are taking those girls into the school arena even if they are pregnant. They have to carry on with their education. The law will take its course on the side but our children have to go back to school.

“The headmaster said, yes I did, the Guidance and Counselling Department, we went to the family and asked them to bring back the girl and they said no. We thought there was not much effort in there. The next morning, we went to the family to confront them. I was part of the entourage that went there. We went to negotiate for our 13-year-old to come back to school. 

“The question that they asked me is, we said we do not want her to go back to school, if you keep on insisting, are you the one who is going to marry her? We want our daughter to go and get married. If you keep on insisting that she comes back into the school system, are you going to marry her?”

Gata said for this to work, her ministry needs the support of the community. 

“We need the support of everybody, the MPs who are in here, so that for us to reduce this number of marriages and pregnancies, we have to work together as a community. We have to advocate for our girls, all of us in here,” she said. 

Gata said 3 324 girls in secondary school and 109 in primary school got pregnant last year. Mashonaland  East had the highest number of girls in secondary school that got pregnant with 499 while Masshonaland West had the highest number of primary school children at 18. The three Mashonaland provinces constituted 42% of the total secondary school girls that got pregnant and 40% of those in primary school.

She said that while the number of girls that got pregnant was high, one of the contributing factors was that her ministry is now properly recording the numbers and the awareness has increased. 

“So, people are coming forward. They are more open so that they can be recorded. It is not really that they are going high but it has been like that for a while not particularly that they are going up every day. It is just because we have improved in taking down the details,” Gata said.

“However, I am not denying that the numbers of our young girls going into marriages and getting pregnant are high.”

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