‘Without Education You Can Never Become President’: Teenage Pregnancy and Pseudo-empowerment in Post-Ebola Sierra Leone

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the emergence of ‘teenage pregnancy’ as a new policy focus in post-Ebola Sierra Leone and explores how Sierra Leoneans interpret the problem of ‘teenage pregnancy’. I argue that the new policy focus is not indicative of changing or new problems. Rather, ‘teenage pregnancy’ has created opportunities for donors and the Government of Sierra Leone to continue cooperation in gender politics. At the same time, Sierra Leoneans are clearly concerned about ‘teenage pregnancy’, and many agree with sensitization campaigns that responsibilize young women and girls while downplaying structural factors that render them vulnerable to arrangements involving transactional sex.

KEYWORDS:

• Sierra Leone
• gender politics
• teenage pregnancy
• neoliberalism
• sexual violence
• aid and development

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Marsha Henry, Charlotte Mertens, Mariam Salehi, Alex Veit and my two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on earlier versions of this article. As always, all mistakes are mine. Research for this article was conducted in the context of a larger project entitled 'Redressing Sexual Violence in Truth Commissions. The Labelling of Women as Victims and its Social Repercussions', funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Anne Menzel is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Conflict Studies, University of Marburg. She received her PhD from Freie Universität Berlin and previously held a postdoctoral position at Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. After finishing her PhD, Anne also worked as a freelance consultant for International Alert. Her research interests include the politics and practice of humanitarian aid, peacebuilding, development cooperation and transitional justice. Anne has also published on un-peaceful relations, patron-client relations, political violence, foreign direct investment, neoliberal values and the Ebola crisis in Sierra Leone.

Notes

1. All interlocutors’ names are pseudonyms.

2. ‘Teenage pregnancy’ is in quotation marks because I refer not foremostly to pregnant teenagers but to ‘teenage pregnancy’ as a policy focus and societal concern.

3. Some efforts also include boys, but the vast majority of campaigns and projects is targeting girls (see also Denney et al. 2016, 19–20).

4. This quote is from the homepage of the Ministry for Information and Communications, see http://mic.gov.sl/dotnetnuke/About-Us/Departments-and-Agencies/ABC.

5. The focus of my research was not ‘teenage pregnancy’ but the current situation of survivors of sexual violence and the impact of the post-war Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I only discovered ‘teenage pregnancy’ as a research topic during my field stay. All in all, I conducted 35 formal interviews and group discussions plus everyday informal conversations and participant observations captured in field notes. About 50 percent of these interviews, discussions, conversations and observations relate to ‘teenage pregnancy’ and form the basis for this article. Interviews and conversations with people outside of professional aid and development circles were usually conducted in Sierra Leone’s lingua franca Krio.

6. UNFPA representatives were not available for an interview.

7. For analyses and discussions of the emphasis placed on the ‘girl child’s’ and, more generally, women’s contributions to development, see e.g. Bedford (2009), Jauhola (2013) and Pincock (2018).

8. Irish Aid and UNDP had allocated some piecemeal funding to local NGOs working with survivors of sexual violence and to the court system. In addition, British funding went into the establishment of a Legal Aid Board, which started operations in 2015.

9. DFID Development Tracker https://devtracker.dfid.gov.uk/projects/GB-1-201018 (last accessed 28 December 2018).

10. DFID Development Tracker https://devtracker.dfid.gov.uk/projects/GB-GOV-1-300183 (last accessed 28 December 2018).

11. Evangelical and Pentecostal churches have been attracting more and more believers in Sierra Leone, especially among urban and socio-economically aspiring populations (see e.g. Shaw 2007). Self-discipline and the ‘gospel of prosperity’ feature prominently in their preaching.

12. These types of arrangements are also certainly not new. Being a girlfriend has long been and continues to be a widely practiced form of female social navigation in Sierra Leone (see e.g. Coulter 2009, 199–205).

13. This ban has been maintained (also by the new government under President Maada Bio), despite continuous criticism from activists and donors (Peyton 2018).

14. For an insightful analysis of the pressures to provide ‘good’ projects, see Krause 2014 (35–36, 47–49).

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article was funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG): [grant number 277327970].