Remarks at the Launch of Early and Unintended Pregnancy Prevention Policy and Management Guidelines

BantfwaBenkhosi

Honourable Minister for Education and Training, Lady Howard Mabuza

The Manzini Regional Administrator

Your Excellencies members of the Diplomatic Corps

Religious and Traditional Leaders,

Senior Government Officials,

CSO representatives,

UN colleagues,

Parents, Teachers, and our dear learners.

Members of the media

Ladies and gentlemen

Sa-ni-bo-na-ni No-nkhe Be-ku-ne-ne!

I am honoured to join all of you this morning as we launch the Eswatini Policy and Guidelines for the Prevention and Management of Learner Pregnancy.

On behalf of the UN Family in Eswatini, I should like to commend His Majesty’s Government for this and other recent initiatives aimed at improving the school and learning experience for our children despite competing needs for resources. Recent initiatives include:

• The successful rollout of the Life Skills Education Programme, a milestone for teenage pregnancy prevention.
• The adoption of the Learning Passport as platform for e-learning, with Form 4 and 5 curricula uploaded and available for all students, while Form 3 curriculum is under development and piloting of Grade 4 under way in some schools.
• The launch about a year ago (at Moyeni High School in Mafutseni) of the Education Plus Initiative (supported by UNAIDS, UNFPA, UNESCO, UNICEF and UN Women), which aims to ensure that our children, especially adolescent girls, enroll in, stay and finish school as the surest way of not only giving them a chance for a better future, but also protecting them from the dangers of HIV, Sexually Transmitted Diseases and early unintended pregnancies.

So, allow me to acknowledge the Ministry of Education and Training, under the leadership of the Hon. Minister Lady Howard Mabuza for the launch today and for these various efforts, and to thank UNESCO for the support to today’s initiative, and UNESCO and UNICEF for the continued partnership with the Ministry to improve learning for our children.

I would also like to acknowledge and thank the Eswatini Network Campaign for Education for All, and all other partners – national and international, that are supporting this and other initiatives of the Ministry of Education & Training.

An important part of my work as the UN Resident Coordinator is to help connect the dots in our work and, therefore, I want to acknowledge other efforts that contribute to securing the future for our children especially girls.

I want to thank the Ministry of Health, NERCHA and UNAIDS for the ongoing efforts to end HIV as a threat to health in Eswatini. I particularly applaud NERCHA’s efforts (including with the Ministry of Public Service) to engage with men on their role in ending HIV, and particularly the continued practice of older men having sex with young girls.

Still on connecting the dots, I want to commend the fact that the launch of the Guidelines today is one of the  key outcomes of the Transforming Education Summit last year which, as you would recall, aims to help countries to focus on recovering from the COVID-19 losses especially for young girls, while transforming our education systems to be ever more aligned to the needs of our future.

Honourable Minister, Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen,

Today’s launch is about securing a bright future for our children and young people. Early pregnancies are a complete opposite of this aspiration as they have far-reaching consequences for the physical, emotional, and social health of girls and women.

According to the World Health Organization, every year an estimated 21 million girls aged 15 to 19 years and 2 million girls younger than 15 years become pregnant in developing regions.       

The highest concentration is in sub-Saharan Africa, where 20%–40% of teenagers are mothers or currently pregnant. This is no way to secure a bright future for our children.

As we launch the guidelines today to secure a bright future for our children and young people, we must see it as a commitment to action guided by the wisdom that it would be pointless to mop the floor while the tap is still running.

To secure a bright future for our children and young people means that we must keep them in school.

To keep them in school we must urgently address early pregnancy and childbirth which are the leading causes of school-dropouts and the leading causes of death among adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa.

To secure a bright future for our children and young people, we must bring down to zero that 8 percent of our girls who drop out of primary school and the 35 percent who drop out of junior secondary school.

To secure a bright future for our children and young people, we must focus on children in rural areas, who are at greater risk of dropping out due to teenage pregnancies.

To secure a bright future for our children and young people means we must drastically reduce Eswatini’s adolescent birth rate which has remained at 87 per 1000 adolescents.

To secure a bright future for our children and young people must entail working on the sad reality that, despite the decrease in new HIV infections, adolescent girls and young people in Eswatini aged between 15-24 years account for approximately 40 percent of new HIV infections.

This morning, I would like to conclude with four key messages.

First, our efforts to secure a bright future for our children must not stop with the pomp and festivity that accompany a launch like today. It must be followed by determined efforts across government, time and society to ensure the ownership implementation and enforcement of the policy guidelines. Our presence here is a promise to our children that we simply must keep.

Second, securing the future of our children, especially girls, will not be achieved without tackling, head-on, the structures and unequal relations that drive violence against women and girls. There is just too much violence in our societies against women and girls, and children.

Third, it will take the entire community to transform society and create the future we must for our children. We must address the structural barriers and patriarchal practices that perpetrate violence and sexual exploitation of children and young girls. We men, in particular, must take the responsibility to educate and discourage each other from preying on young girls, at times forcing them to drop out of school. I am glad that we have Bobabe Tikhulu (traditional leaders) in our midst today. You play a big role in the transformation of our communities.

Fourth, the overall goal of the policy being launched today is to contribute towards increasing the basic education completion rate of learners, especially adolescent girls and young women as a preventative strategy. We must explore and advocate for ways to increase investments in education and improve efficiencies so that the available resources benefit more children, especially the most vulnerable.

Our children deserve to become who they want to become and to participate in the creation of the world they want to live in.

I conclude, as I must, by pledging the continued commitment of the entire UN Family to support the Government and the people of Eswatini in all ways possible on the implementation of the guidelines that we launch today and, more broadly, in the efforts to improve education, secure the future for our children, and in all efforts to achieve the Agenda 2030 of the Sustainable Development Goals.        

To all our learners it is simple:

Stay in school!

Stay curious and hungry for education!

Stay thirsty for more learning!

Dream and fly!  

Siyabonga Kakhulu!

I thank you.