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Any girl who gets pregnant while in school won’t be allowed to resume after giving birth under the current government, Tanzania President John Magufuli has said.
“After getting pregnant, you are done,” Magufuli said to applause at a rally in Chalinze town, about 100km west of Dar es Salaam.
"After calculating some few mathematics she’d be asking the teacher in the classroom let me go out and breastfeed my crying baby. If we were to allow the girls back to school, one day we would find all girls in Standard One going home to nurse their babies,” the president added to a round of another applause.
According to BBC, Magufuli said that the man responsible for the pregnancy will be jailed for 30 years and use the energy he used to impregnate the girl into farming while in jail.
The president also accused civil society of being used by foreign agents to urge the government to re-take teen-mothers back to schools. He told them to open schools for parents and stop forcing the government to take them back.
"I'm giving out free education for students who have really decided to go and study, and now you want me to educate the parents?"
And while Magufuli seems to think teen mothers are the problem of the civil society, the country continues to record high rates of teen drop outs, illiteracy and poverty levels.
In 2016, the Human Rights Watch said that more than 40% of Tanzanian adolescents weren’t in school, less than a third of girls made it to high school and an estimated 8,000 girls dropped out each year.
In the past, the government and the civil society worked together to keep girls in schools by educating them about their rights.
