Hundreds of teenage girls in Kenya drop out of school every year due to pregnancy. While the Ministry of Education has now made it illegal to expell or suspend young girls from school due to pregnancies, there still remain enormous challenges for these young women.

Nicole Khalani is a young woman who has been through a tumultuous journey of self-discovery, social stigma and courage. As I listened to her telling her story, I felt compelled to re-tell this story here; which is just not one story, but the life of many young Kenyan women.

This is her story
The father of her child, like many young men, disappeared from her life when he found out that she was laden with child. Terrified of her family and of her friends’ reaction, Khalani decided to deny that she was pregnant, wishing to make the pregnancy vanish again, as if by magic. She told herself several times that she was not pregnant, hoping that she could wish the growing child away. She kept a strict workout regime in the hope that her growing belly would not show.

The birth of her child
One day her water broke, but she did not know that she was about to have her baby. Someone rushed her to the hospital. It was then that her family found out, through her friend’s mother, that their “child” was having a baby.

Unlike many girls in a situation such as hers, Khalani was lucky. She stayed with an aunt who taught her how to be a mother. On days when she cried because she did not understand why everyone treated her differently, she wondered how she was going to make it. While she did not practice safe sex, she was in a relationship and was not sleeping around contrary to rumors.

Supporting Child and Self
Khalani tried looking for a job, in vain, but she met a myriad of obstacles. Not only was she just a high school graduate, but she was a young mother as well.

Many young girls continue to be stigmatized by society as teenagers with pregnancies. Even those who receive support from their family (those who were not kicked out of home) are treated differently, yes very harshly so. Motherhood is challenging, even for women who conceive under societal norms.

Economic hardship is a reality in Kenya, and in so many aspects for teenage mothers these hardships are tenfold. With little or no formal training, they are left at a loss on what to do, as choices are limited.

Khalani’s Vision—the Young Mother’s Initiative Project
It is within the Young Women’s Leadership Institute (YWLI) that Khalani found her calling. YWLI was founded to “create space for young women to organize themselves around leadership issues, identify issues of concern to them, and speak for themselves.” (The YWLI website is down, read here a summary on their activities).

At YWLI Khalani began the Young Mother's Initiative Project whose goal is threefold: empower and build the self esteem of teenage mothers, disseminate and share information via the internet and mainstream media and to facilitate intergenerational dialog between teenage mothers and older women.

After a visit to Dandora, Khalani says, "These young mothers are willing to share their experiences with each, but lack a safe space to do so. It is only through sharing that they will be able to start the healing process as some of them are still bitter with themselves, as young mothers. The discovery, made during sharing, that theirs is a shared experience is empowering for many. "

Without a social welfare system and a society where women still bear the brunt of society's responsibility to take care of children born out of wedlock,the challenges of a teenage girl raising a child are enormous.

Defining a call to action is not simple since ours is a society that has different standards for men than it does women. Equal parental responsibility must be accorded each parent.