Motherhood in Childhood

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such as child marriage or family or community pressures, or because schools forbid pregnant girls from attending or forbid their return once they have had a baby (Panday et al., 2009). And even in countries where laws allow girls to return, a minority of girls actually resumes education. In South Africa, for example, the Constitution and the Schools Act of 1996 state that girls who become pregnant should not be denied access to education, but one review found that only about one in three adolescents who left school because of a pregnancy ever returned. A study in Chile found that being a mother reduces a girl’s likelihood of attending and completing high school by between 24 per cent and 37 per cent (Kruger et al., 2009). The problem of truncated education for adolescent mothers is not unique to developing countries. In the United States, for example, 329,772 children were born to adolescents between the ages of 15 and 19 in 2011. Only “I was happy and sad at the same time. Happy because I gave birth to a precious baby boy… But my parents have to support me and my baby now… I dropped out of school, and since then I have to find a job to support my child… I’m a single mom. I have to do everything for my baby.” Thoko, South Africa (no age given) about half of the girls who become pregnant as teenagers manage to complete their high school education by age 22. In contrast, nine tenths of girls who do not become pregnant as teenagers obtain their high school diploma by age 22 (Perper et al., 2010). The longer girls are out of school, the less likely they are to return. For girls to be able to return to school, supportive policies are necessary but often insufficient: new mothers are also likely to need financial assistance, child care and one-on-one counselling to help them deal with the challenges, including stigma, of adolescent motherhood. Economic impact When a girl has the power to delay a pregnancy, she may also be empowered socially to stay in school, and then economically to secure a more lucrative job or pursue other income-earning opportunities, according to a World Bank study (Chaaban and Cunningham, 2012). Investments that empower girls are beneficial to the economy; conversely, the costs of not investing in them are high. The lifetime opportunity cost related to adolescent pregnancy—measured by the mother’s foregone annual income over her lifetime— ranges from 1 per cent of annual GDP in China to 30 per cent of annual GDP in Uganda. The opportunity cost is a measure of “what could have been” if only the additional investment had been made in girls. The World Bank study illustrates the opportunity costs associated with adolescent pregnancy and dropping out of school. If all 1.6 million adolescent girls in Kenya, for example, completed secondary school, and if the 220,098 adolescent mothers there were employed instead of having become pregnant, the cumulative 26 CHAPTER 2: THE IMPACT ON GIRLS' HEALTH, EDUCATION AND PRODUCTIVITY
effect could have added $3.4 billion to Kenya’s gross income every year. This is equivalent to the entire Kenyan construction sector. Similarly, Brazil would have greater productivity equal to more than $3.5 billion if teenage girls delayed pregnancy until their early twenties, while India’s productivity would be $7.7 billion higher. Since most adolescent pregnancies occur at a time when girls are of secondary-school age, dropping out of secondary school results in higher costs to the economy than dropping out of primary school. Because the number of affected girls is much greater among secondary school populations than among primary school populations, the negative impact on returns on investment in secondary education is much higher than the negative impact on primary school education. The World Bank study states that this analysis underestimates the true cost of not investing in girls. The costs computed are only economic ones and should be seen as lower than the true social costs. The study looks only at lost productivity in the labour market and thus does not estimate costs incurred to women’s health, the possible implications for the child’s future productivity as indicated by studies that show that children of adolescent mothers have lower school attainment rates, and the social costs of unwed adolescent mothers. The true costs, which include lower health status of the children of these girls, lower life expectancy, skill obsolescence of jobless girls, less social empowerment, and so forth would increase the cost estimates many-fold (Cunningham et al., 2008). When policy failures or other pressures on adolescent girls result in large numbers of pregnancies, the economic costs may extend beyond the individual to the community and the nation. LIFETIME COST OF ADOLESCENT PREGNANCY OF THE CURRENT COHORT OF GIRLS 15 TO 19 YEARS OLD, AS SHARE OF ANNUAL GDP USA Norway Sweden China United Kingdom Brazil Bangladesh Paraguay India Ethiopia Kenya Tanzania Nigeria Malawi Uganda Source: Chaaban and Cunningham, 2011. 1 1 1 1 2 Some costs may arise, for example, through increased demand on already overstretched health care systems for the management of complications from unsafe abortions to adolescents. According to the International Sexual and Reproductive Rights Coalition (2002), “In many developing countries, hospital records 0 10 11 12 12 5 15 10 17 18 15 20 26 27 25 30 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 Lifetime Cost % of GDP 30 35 THE STATE OF WORLD POPULATION 2013 27
Page 1 and 2: Motherhood in Childhood Facing the
Page 3 and 4: state of world population 2013 Moth
Page 5 and 6: to health. Conversely, a girl who i
Page 7 and 8: “I was 14… My mom and her siste
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Page 11 and 12: Research shows that addressing unin
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Page 15 and 16: 1 A global challenge Every year in
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Page 19 and 20: According to DHS and MICS surveys,
Page 21 and 22: “Efforts—and resources—to pre
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Page 25 and 26: A UNFPA review of four countries fo
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Page 29 and 30: ESTIMATING ADOLESCENT PREGNANCY AND
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Page 37 and 38: ADOLESCENTS, AGES 10 TO 19, LIVING
Page 39: community environments, she may fee
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Page 45 and 46: 3 Pressures from many directions Ad
Page 47 and 48: DETERMINANTS OF ADOLESCENT PREGNANC
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eight outreach centres which offer,
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influence gender-related attitudes
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ehaviours of boys and girls, or inc
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5 Charting the way forward Adolesce
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overlooked by policymakers and deve
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and providing a safe environment fo
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©Mark Tuschman/Packard Foundation
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great risk of injury, illness and m
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• Registering all births and marr
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not address social norms risk treat
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Towards empowered adolescent girls
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Indicators Monitoring ICPD goals: s
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Monitoring Monitoring ICPD ICPD Goa
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Monitoring ICPD Goals Demographic -
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Monitoring ICPD Goals - Selected In
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Bibliography Abdella A. et al. 2013
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Delivering a world where every preg
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