Abstinence-only education does not speak to today’s adolescents

“They grow up so fast,” parents often lament. Here is a reality check, statistics from a 2018 report by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) found that nearly 378,400 adolescent Kenyan girls aged between 10 and 19 years became pregnant between July 2016 and June 2017. This means that one in five Kenyan teenage girls was reported to be pregnant during that period.

The shocking scale only reveals the extent to which we have continued to sweep under the rug candid discussions about adolescent sexuality. Another report released in June 2019 by JIACTIVATE in partnership with Geopoll revealed that only 6 percent of Kenyan youth wanted to learn more about sex.