Implementation of Education Re-Entry Policy for Adolescent Mothers in Urambo District, Tanzania

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Implementation of Education Re-Entry Policy for Adolescent Mothers in Urambo District, Tanzania

Journal Title: International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research and Analysis - Year 2024, Vol 7, Issue 10

Abstract

In Tanzania, adolescent mothers were pre+viously been prohibited from returning to public secondary schools particularly during the fifth government phase led by the late President John Joseph Pombe Magufuli. However, under his successor President Samia Suluhu Hassan, a new re-entry policy for adolescent mother has been re-introduced. The policy aims to address the challenges faced by adolescent mothers who drop out of school due to pregnancy. Although the policy granted the opportunities for adolescent mothers to continue with their studies after giving birth, its implementation in country is still uncertain. It is against this backdrop that the current study explored the perceptions held by selected educational stakeholders and adolescent mothers to appraise the extent to which the re-entry education policy has thus far been implemented, drawing on a case of the secondary schools sampled from Urambo District, in Tanzania. The study deployed the interpretivist approach and phenomenological research design. Purposive sampling was used to select ten study participants reflecting two counter factual scenarios, namely: adolescent mothers who enrolled through re-entry program after delivery and who did not do so after delivery. The methods of data collection included in-depth interview with adolescent mothers and key informants; and focus grouped discussions with community members. The data were analysed through thematic analysis. The study findings revealed that implementation of the re-entry policy is marked with several challenges on part of the adolescent mothers which include: lack of support from families and schools. More to say, there prevails a stubbornly rigid and unchanging social stigma subjecting the typologies of the mothers into a state of dilemma, making it difficult for them to perform both the expected double roles of a mother and student simultaneously. The study also disclosed a lack of clarity on the re-entry policy guidelines, which has forced some of the re-entry policy implementers to use their own discretions. Additionally, the findings indicated that awareness creation was not sufficient enough to enable adolescent mother especially in remote areas to enrol back to school after pregnancy. The paper recommends that, for successful implementation of the re-entry policy, comprehensive counselling programmes for adolescent mothers and awareness creation among the educational stakeholders and community members are inevitable.

Authors and Affiliations

Edna Harriet Mtoi

Keywords

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EP ID EP749678
DOI 10.47191/ijmra/v7-i10-39
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