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Empowering Sudanese girls to prevent teen pregnanciesChristine Simon, 18, still has one-and-a-half years of primary school left but she is proud to have reached this level of education, despite growing up away from home, with a baby to support. Juba - "I want to read, to go on; that is why I came back to school," Simon said in the Southern Sudan capital. While growing up a refugee in the Central African Republic (CAR) after the long war in Southern Sudan disrupted her education, Simon fell pregnant. She acknowledges that she was lucky - two of her friends who became pregnant are unlikely to get back to school. She and her former boyfriend have no interest in getting married, leaving his mother and aunt look after the baby, Chantal, while she is in class. If Simon makes it to the end of next year, she will be one of the relatively small number of girls who finish primary school in Southern Sudan, according to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). ChallengesSimon's headmaster reckons that as many as three-quarters of his female students drop out because of pregnancy, some as young as 11. He and two of his colleagues have themselves had daughters dropping out for the same reason. According to Simon, money and gifts are often an incentive to have sex with older men as well as age mates. Teachers say the solution is to set up girls' boarding schools across the state. "But then there'd still be the holidays," said one. "Really, we do not know what is going on." Although UNICEF officials say that Western Equatoria has been Southern Sudan's biggest success story in terms of boosting female enrolment - especially with the advent of peace and free education - the numbers drop off again when the girls reach 14-16. "There is no problem for gender equity in the lower primary classes, sometimes we even find more girls, but in the upper classes there's a significant drop because of pregnancy and early marriage," explains Njagi. Peer pressureShe is working to roll out the Girl's Education Movement across Southern Sudan, a peer-to-peer system where girls and boys encourage others (and their parents) to go to school. The key, however, is to encourage girls to stay in school. Rather than just handing out condoms to the boys and scare-stories to the girls, Njagi says UNICEF and the government are trying to encourage members of these mixed-sex peer groups at schools to support each other. This would help to reduce teen pregnancy. Article courtesy of IRIN |