Kenya: The Lost Girls

two girls. The boys used to tell us, what are you still doing in this class? Ka Kenya stayed in school because her mother pushed her too, and she eventually got a scholarship to study at a university in the US. She now runs her own ngeo Ka Kenya's Dream that helps girls in her community stay in school and delay marriage into adulthood. Because of organizations like hers and a push from advocacy groups and the Kenyan government, girls enrollment in secondary school has shut up. In the last years.

The rates of girls completing secondary school there have doubled, according to data from the World Bank. That increases their earning potential and the quality of their lives and their children's lives. The country is well off when the women are taken care of, and that woman starts from that little girl, who you need to support, who you need to protect, who we need to God. Then the pandemic hit, shutting down schools and programs like Kenya's Dream. Kenya feared

that the lockdowns would threaten all that progress. For the first time, the guests were sent home and to stay for a very long time without event knowing when they will come back. There was good reason to worry eight years ago when schools closed for months at a time during the Ebola crisis in West Africa. Girls there got off track, and one of the main culprits was a spike in teen pregnancy rates, which made it hard for many of them to finish school. When young girls have kids,

that has all sorts of knock on effects. They're less likely to find financial stability, and their children are less likely to complete their schooling too. In March, it looked like Kenya was headed down that path. They went back to the homes that were not prepared to have goals. Especially for us, we had gay in high school or poy in college. Yet there was one small but crucial thing that could potentially give someone like Ka Kenya some

hope during the Ebola crisis. Researchers found that those who had participated in community based programs like Ka Kenya's Dream that were focused on empowerment and sexual health before things shut down, they were less likely to get pregnant during lockdown and more likely to return to school when restrictions were lifted. The pandemic would almost certainly set girls and Kenya back. But is it possible because of people like

Kenya that they can recover just as quickly? Dobless claims coming in, I mean really jumping from the week before, pretty brutal. Three point to million records. Six point six million Americans filed for unemployment last week and didn't working women were the worst infected by the pandemic. We believe that we are in facting one girl, one family, one village, one country at the time. Well, now to the billionaire boom.

According to Bloombird, super yacht charters are up over three d and a billionaire was created every twenty six I was during this pandemic. No, I'm not waiting in line for a COVID test with the public gross. It is time for a wealth tax in America. We'll come back to the paycheck. I'm Rebecca Greenfield. One of the good news stories in the recent history of wealth inequality is that globally, the gap between the richest and the poorest

has been closing. There are a few reasons for that, but a big one that has pulled millions out of poverty has been the push in developing nations to educate young girls. Only half of the world's girls were enrolled in school, but within two decades that proportion has risen to two thirds. In many countries, the education gap between girls and boys has closed entirely. The benefits have been many. A girl born today will live on average, eight years

longer than one born years ago. Women with a secondary education are more likely to delay marriage and plan their family, and less likely to be stuck in an abusive relationship and poverty. The pandemic on four sinately has been a setback reaching gender parity. Acquainting the World Economic Forum has been set back by a generation. They said would take about hundred years before the pandemic to reach under parity. Now it's a generation on from that's about hundred and

thirty five years. That's Namil Ahmed a strategist at Oxfam International, global poverty nonprofit. While we've seen women in many countries face also this second pandemic of increased gender based violence, of this mountain of care work, as ever that the shock absorbers really of crisis. One place that has been hit particularly hard is Kenya because of its high poverty rate and fragile healthcare system. The country had one of

the harshest responses to the virus. Schools were closed through January. There were curfews, travel bands, and area specific lockdowns that helped keep infection rates low, but it resulted in greater food and security, more domestic violence, and high unemployment. In some ways, girls have felt it the hardest. Earlier this year, journalist Jill Filipovic published a troubling story in Bloomberg Business

Week magazine. She profiled girls who had big dreams, but they were struggling with new realities filled with more violence, hunger, poverty, and sometimes new babies of their own to care for. But the stories of their lives didn't end there. With COVID restrictions lifting and the global economy inching its way to recovery, we asked her to return to Kenya's capital Nairobi to see how some of those girls were faring. Now here she is with the story. Meet Esther, an

eighteen year old girl living in Nairobi. She had dreams of becoming a newscaster, and before the pandemic she was on track. She was in Form one, the equivalent of ninth grade, and if she graduated in three years as planned, she would have been the first girl in her family to finish secondary school. We've changed Esther's name here to

protect her privacy. I want to become one delay Victoria Ubady, like so many ancles like I feel so good when they're just presenting, especially when they're talking English, like I admire that. Like I want to make someone that can give other people inspiration, tell them that I was like this and they have walked through this darkest time, heaviest time,

and still today and strong and I'm able to love. Then, the COVID lockdowns in March left Esther stuck at home and out of school in a small, crowded house in what can be a tough neighborhood. Estra's mother had never been particularly stable, but the pandemic pushed her stress levels to new highs, and she began badly abusing her daughter. It wasn't so good for me and my mom at home. Sometimes we didn't understand each other. We had quarrels over

small things. My mom chegged me away. She would send me away off like great out of myself. So it was like I was trying to look for safety players we can be. Esther's mom eventually kicked her out of the house. At night, Esther would sleep in a nearby forest, armed up with her boyfriend. By the time Esther realized she was pregnant, she was several months along. Her boyfriend was unsupportive, denying the baby was his. He left Esther alone to carry and raise their child, who she gave

birth to in November. I'm just tired. Every will just go on crying, crying, crying, like I don't have anything to do with my life. I just want to die. Esther is far from an outlier. The u n f p A, the United Nations Family Planning Arm, found that a lack of access to contraceptives in low and middle income countries during the pandemic resulted in one point for a million unintended pregnancies. Well, pregnancies were already high among

girls and Kenya even before the pandemic. They shot up for girls who were in second dairy school when COVID hit. Compared to girls who sat for their final exams in nineteen, those who were supposed to complete their schooling in were twice as likely to become pregnant and three times as likely to drop out of school entirely. But Esther also had a stroke of luck. She lives in Cabara, a large and vibrant low income neighborhood in Nairobi, and down

the road from her house is Project Alimu. Project Alimu is a well regarded ballet school. It's cracked concrete walls are painted in bright colors and hold up an uneven tin roof. Inside, it's a festival of noise. The music shifts from classical to afrobeats. Kids shriek and cackle, girls

flounced around, and the leggings and two twos. Esther isn't a dancer, but at Project a Limu she found a little help from Michael Michael Maya, I'm the founder of Project to Lima, which is an after school program based here in Cabra. So my main work is I teach dance, but also I do a lot of mentorship and the psyco social support to lots and lots of children in Cubra. Michael plays a big role in his Caberra community project. A Limu trains dozens of dancers and here students have

a safe space away from the stressors at home. When they come to project. To Limu, they can get something to eat, girls can find sanitary pads, and children who come here have the chance to play, to be kids and to hear that they're important. During the early days of the pandemic, project a Limu had to shut down. It's funding also dried up as donors redirected their money

to COVID relief. With COVID, it was so big because the problem was the schools had all shut down, and a lot of support that all these girls get comes from their schooling and a lot of per education, a lot of psycho social support, a lot of food for instance, and then also just a place that they would just be girls. In Kenya, schools are were most low income

kids get their most consistent meal of the day. Most households like internet access, making online learning close to impossible, and when schools closed, kids were thrust into difficult living situations with parents who are out of work and highly stressed. You know, when there's less money in a household, and houses saw it growing up in my own family. When there's less money and there's high demand of food, there's stress.

And when there is stress, it leads to violence because we don't have other ways of handling our stress if it's not violence, And so there was a lot of domestic violence cases. There was also a lot of sexual

abuse and young girls. Many teenage girls like Esther found attention, food, and financial support from adult man, but a few of them had learned much about sexual health and pregnancy prevention, not to mention sexual consent, and many of these relationships were fundamentally imbalanced between adolescent girls who needed basics like sanitary pads, a few dollars for food and shelter, and

adult men who could make sex the price tag. So when the girls grew they never got that parent to support from their parents because their parents were also young adults at that time when they were born, so they never got enough time to learn about for instances, sexual education to get to understand how to keep themselves safe. So you would find girls who are tricked into having boyfriends at a very alle age, because then the boyfriends would provide in majority of them. They see their moms

also stuck into relationships that are very toxic. So some of the girls got pregnant unluckily, but we were able to find a way in supporting the astro Found Refuge and project a lever. Mike supported me from the time when I was five months pregnant. He told me, it is not the end. You have big rocks, you have big mountains, and you're a human being. People do make mistake, but it is the same time you have understand yourself and you want to be given another chance to go

back to school. And you're not afraid because I'm here to mentor you. I'm here to tell you need to study when you don't have to be the same that you are. You don't need to be cheated by boys again. You need to understand no matter how hard the situation is, you need to focus. You don't need to fight people to make them understand you. Yes, I don't need to fight with my mom to understand me because it is my mistake and I need to correct my mistake by myself.

No one should judge me by my mistake. Because they don't know my goodness. Like Michael, Florence mcgeary works with adolescence in an informal Nairobi settlement. Along with some friends, she founded the organization l E S, Lead, Educate and Succeed, which provides local adolescent girls with information about sexual health, pushes them to assert themselves and encourages them to dream

big for their futures. Since Corona had to strike like the whole country, not only in Kenya, we saw that it's nice to have a discussion with the young people because those high rate of pregnancy in Kenya, because of the idleness of the young people. I sat in on a session Florence and her fellow educators held with some

two dozen girls about sexual health. Florence says parents are grateful for her classes because kids are are always comfortable talking to them about sex and parents aren't always comfortable talking to their kids about sex either. They're not going to school and all the people that are taking advantage of them of their naivety, and then it was there was cassity of food, the parents were not working, so it was like kind of kills, but it's quiet kills. Now.

Schools and community programs are open again, but many adults don't have their jobs back or badly in debt, which means they can't afford to pay the school fees that are a fixture in many African countries, and we're a barrier to education even before the pandemic. There's so many family school not of food. And the good thing is that the government was like, no, you need to open

up the school for every kid to come. That was the case for Evelyn, who I met last year and then caught up with again on my recent trip to Kenya. Evelyn lost her job in March and still hasn't returned to a formal workplace, although she does small jobs around her neighborhood to make ends meet. When COVID hit shutdowns closed school for her two kids, ten year old Blessing and six year old Miguel, Evelyn did her best to teach them at home, going over the alphabet with Miguel

and quizzing Blessing on her English. When schools finally reopened in January one, though Evelyn still wasn't back to work and didn't have the money to pay for her kids to re enroll. She takes home roughly nine d Kenyan shillings a week, which amounts to less than eight U S dollars, not enough to cover school fees. It hurt, but since I didn't have that cash to take them back to school. Luckily, the schools let her kids come back. Even though Evelyn was still in arrears. Back in school,

Blessing is excelling. She had the highest marks in her class this term. Evelyn, who dropped out of high school after getting pregnant, wants her daughter to go farther than she did. Maybe, Evelyn says, Blessing will be a doctor someday. You know, for me, I didn't reach that level. I gave birth when I was informed too. So for my kids I want them to to go higher than me so that they can have a better future. For Blessing, she's a great girl, so I can't afford to miss

with her life. And for girls who end up pregnant, school fees aren't the only hurdle. Even though Kenyan law entitles teenage mothers to an education, there's still a tremendous stigma attached to youth pregnancy. A girl's parents may decide not to pay for her schooling. She may not have anyone to watch her child while she learns, and even if she overcomes those challenges and gets into a classroom, she may face bullying by her peers and even her teachers.

Some schools who are not fully embracing gods who have given birth, there's a lot of stigma when you go back to school as a young mother. They always talk of people who just went out to have sex and came back with babies. Instead of designing the school to be a safe space for these girls, it became a

place that they did not feel comfortable. The result is that girls who enter into motherhood early are subject to the whims of the adults around them and are often only able to complete their schooling if they're very lucky and if they have someone with a little power advocating for them. It gets so hard for them, so they weren't out sometimes, but we try to encourage them as much as we can to have them just back in school.

We decided to redesign our approach whereby if you were unlucky and you got pregnant, we still embrace you as one of us, and we were able to find help for them. We find a way of getting proper medical support and then also using the network within our parents, because we have parents who how do you call them? Community health volunteers and they're very good with pre natural care and after you've given bath, they will help you. After being out for a year, Esther is finally back

in school and helping to graduate. After that, she says she wants to start her own business so she can provide for herself and her son. For me, I see lights, I see like I'm going to that moon that I wanted. But now I feel so good because I have Mike support and he told me to go back to school. I feel so proud because it is like I'm making a step, like I want to become that person that I wanted to become in life. Make this said, know

that I don't need to prove them wrong. I need to prove myself from that no matter what they did to me, still able to raise my son on my own and do a better job that can make my family get out of this this place because it's not a good list for all of us. This is a crucial moment, not just for women and girls, but for the well being of entire nations. National economies will grow or shrink depending on women's ability to get an education,

work and plan their families. Next week on the Paycheck, we had to a part of the world that's on uptick and marriage during the pandemic. But it wasn't all joyful celebrations, girls objective. Many of the girls that didn't want it to get married. But when we try to stop even the community people, they said, by you, people are dropping, let it happen. Thanks for listening to The Paycheck. If you like our show, please head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts to rate,

review and subscribe. This episode was hosted by Me Rebecca Greenfield and reported by a Jail Filipovic. It was edited by Danielle Balbi with help from Francesca Levi, Janet Paskin Rocksheeta Saluja and Me. We also had editing help from Shelley Banjo, Kristin v. Brown, Gilda to Carly, Nicole Flato, Elissa McDonald, and Kai Schultz. This episode was produced by Gilda to Carly and sound engineered by Matt him. Our original music is by Leo Sidron. Special thanks to Magnus Hendrickson,

Margaret Sutherland, Stacy Wong, and Aisha Diallo. Francesca Levi is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. See you next week.