Along with it: The burden teenage mothers carry alone

The moment Alphine Ouma's life changed, she was standing inside a bathroom in Nairobi's Umoja estate, staring at two pink lines on a pregnancy test.

Just minutes earlier, she had been a Form Three student worrying about ordinary teenage things, homework, friends, and the end-of-year examinations that were only months away.

Now at 17, every plan she had made for herself suddenly seemed uncertain.

Panicked, she reached for her phone and called her boyfriend, hoping they would figure out what to do together.

Instead, she got an answer she never imagined she would hear.

"I informed him, but his answer made my heart sink," Alphine recalls. "He said, 'I'm not ready to be a dad.'"

For the teenager, the conversation marked the beginning of months filled with fear, uncertainty and questions she was too young to answer.

She could not tell her parents and she was not sure whether she would return to school. Every passing day made the pregnancy harder to hide.

"I knew at that moment that this journey would be me alone," she says.

Several kilometres away, another teenager was slowly arriving at the same conclusion.

In Korogocho, 17-year-old Vivian Adhiambo remembers noticing that her monthly period had been delayed.

At first she convinced herself it was nothing, but days became weeks and weeks turned into months, but fear kept her from buying a pregnancy test.

Instead, she watched her body answer the question she was too afraid to ask.

"I missed my period in March and suspected I was pregnant, but I was too afraid to conduct a pregnancy test," she says, gently placing a hand over her growing belly. "I didn't, and this is the only proof I have of being pregnant."

Like Alphine, Vivian turned to the person she thought would walk beside her.

She told her 18-year-old boyfriend about the missed periods, hoping he would share her worry but instead he dismissed her.

"He told me our relationship had not gotten to that point yet and we are still too young to have a child."

Hurt and disappointed, Vivian deleted his number from her phone. She hoped he would eventually call back, apologise or simply ask how she was doing but two months later, the call has not come.

"That showed me I'm alone in this journey," she says.

The two girls have never met and they come from different families in different circumstances, yet their stories echo each other almost word for word.

Across Kenya, thousands of teenage girls are carrying the same burden.

According to the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS), the country recorded 235,938 adolescent pregnancies in 2025, with Nairobi among the counties reporting the highest numbers. Behind every figure is a story that rarely ends with childbirth alone. It often stretches into interrupted education, financial hardship, strained family relationships and the difficult transition into adulthood before childhood has truly ended.

For Dr Anthony Ajayi, a research scientist at the African Population and Health Research Centre (APHRC), one part of that story often goes unnoticed.

"Boys are invisible because they don't carry pregnancies," he says.

"You can't simply see that a boy has made a lady pregnant. The emphasis is more on girls than boys."

That invisibility, he says, has consequences long after a pregnancy is confirmed.

Research conducted by the centre in Korogocho found paternity denial in about 36 per cent of adolescent pregnancies.

"If boys deny paternity, it means that both they and their family will not contribute to taking care of the child," he explains.

He adds that even when young fathers acknowledge responsibility, many are teenagers themselves, still in school or unemployed, making financial support difficult.

The result, Dr Ajayi says, is that most of the burden quietly shifts to the girl and her family.

Alphine soon learnt what that burden looked like.

As the months passed, hiding the pregnancy became impossible. Afraid of becoming the subject of whispers at school and around the neighbourhood, she left home and moved into her cousin's single room.

It was only meant to be temporary and later she was sent to stay with an elderly relative in the village, but the arrangement did not last. The older woman struggled to care for a pregnant teenager, forcing Alphine to return home, where a different reality awaited her.

When labour finally came, it ended in an emergency Caesarean section and her newborn son spent an entire month in the Newborn Intensive Care Unit (NICU), while Alphine remained in the hospital watching other mothers leave with healthy babies.

By the time they were discharged, motherhood had become her full-time responsibility and

the classroom she had left behind seemed further away than ever.

When Alphine finally returned home, the hardest part of her journey was only beginning.

The days quickly settled into a routine she had never imagined for herself. There was a baby to feed, clothes to wash, meals to prepare and a household to help run. As her son grew, so did the expectations around her.

Meanwhile, life outside her compound appeared to move on without her.

Every morning, students in uniforms walked past on their way to school, most of them her former classmates, now preparing to join the university she had once expected to go to alongside them.

She watched them from a distance and wished she could join.

"I started feeling frustrated and annoyed," she says. "Small things would make me flare up and shout unnecessarily, even at my child, who didn't even understand what was happening."

Today, the 18-year-old runs a small charcoal business that earns just enough to buy diapers and baby food for her son. Returning to school remains a hope she has not completely abandoned, although each passing month makes it feel more distant.

"I don't know what my future will be like because this is the last year of KCSE and it's already too late to go back," she says.

Vivian's reality looks different, but carries the same weight.

Instead of preparing for childbirth with the support of a partner, she spends most of her days moving from one house to another in Korogocho, washing clothes and cleaning for neighbours whenever work is available.

The money she earns is little but it helps pay for transport to clinic appointments and a few necessities before her baby arrives.

She believes her story began long before the pregnancy.

Dropping out of school because her father could no longer afford school fees left her searching for somewhere she still felt she belonged.

She found that comfort in a boy she had once gone to school with.

"If not for poverty, I wouldn't have dropped out of school and maybe wouldn't have gotten involved with this guy," she says.

"This is someone we went to the same school with and spending time with him made me feel like I was still part of the school."

Her father was disappointed when he learnt she was pregnant, but he did not send her away.

Instead, he continues doing casual jobs to ensure there is food at home.

"He provides food in the house and that's already enough for me," Vivian says.

Stories like Alphine's and Vivian's have become familiar to Mary Oliech, who works with young mothers, fathers and parents at Miss Koch Kenya, a community organisation based in Korogocho.

She says financial hardship is often the first obstacle teenage parents encounter.

"They are young and depending on their parents, who are not even able to provide for them," she says. "It becomes difficult for them to feed their children and many girls end up dropping out of school."

While some grandparents step in to raise the babies as the young mothers return to school, many families simply do not have the resources to do so.

Oliech says many young fathers they work with admit they stay away because they have no income, yet emotional support is equally important to the mothers raising the children.

The emotional impact, she adds, is often hidden from public view.

"At some point these girls lose themselves," she says. "They cannot think straight."

Some become withdrawn. Others struggle with overwhelming frustration as they adjust to motherhood while still trying to understand adolescence themselves.

For Dr Anthony Ajayi, the conversation around teenage pregnancy needs to move beyond assigning blame.

He argues that adolescent motherhood is too often viewed as a moral failure instead of a public health and social protection issue.

"We need to understand that there needs to be support for adolescents who bear children," he says.

That support, he argues, should not end after delivery.

Instead, it should include child maintenance, social protection and practical interventions that allow teenage mothers to return to school and rebuild their lives.

Without such support, he warns, the cycle is likely to repeat itself.

"If we do nothing, chances are that the cycle will repeat itself, even with the babies they bring into the world."

More than two decades after becoming a teenage father himself, Douglas Mutokha now sees the imbalance differently.

He admits that while his education continued uninterrupted, the mother of his child bore the greater consequences of their decisions.

"Pregnancy affects the mother more than it does the father," he says. "This child slows the life of the mother down for almost three to four years. Even going back to school becomes a problem."

Looking back, he says he escaped accountability.

"I thank God I was not given any trouble, although looking back, it is not something that I'm proud of."

His message to young fathers Today is simple. "Be there. Be emotionally available. Offer your moral support and psychological support. It doesn't always have to be about money."

For now, Alphine and Vivian continue navigating lives they never imagined for themselves.

One measures her days in bags of charcoal sold and diapers bought. The other counts the weeks until childbirth while taking on odd jobs around the neighbourhood to prepare for a baby she will largely raise without the child's father.

They have never met, yet their stories echo each other in remarkable ways.

Both were teenagers when pregnancy interrupted their education. Both watched the fathers of their children drift away.

Both found themselves relying on family members who were already struggling to make ends meet.

Their experiences suggest that while pregnancy may begin with two teenagers, the responsibility that follows often rests on one and long after the two lines, Alphine and Vivian are still carrying the burden that was never meant to be alone.