NAIROBI, KENYA – Sofia Atieno is just 16, but she is already the mother of a 1-year-old son, Erastus Owino.
Atieno, an orphan, lives in Mathare, a sprawling slum of Nairobi, the capital, where she takes care of her son and her younger brother, Thomas Omondi, 13. She says her mother died when she was 7, and her father died in 2009, both after short illnesses.
"I lost my virginity when I was 13, even though I knew nothing much about sex."
She says she became sexually active after her father died. She was in seventh grade. Atieno says her father never talked openly about sex, a taboo subject in Kenya.
“How could he even start talking to me about sex?” she asks shyly.
But she says that his absence allowed her to become more promiscuous. The following year, 2010, she got pregnant and dropped out of school.
She says the father of her unborn child vanished, so she has had to take care of their son all by herself. She does casual labor in the slums to earn money, taking on odd jobs like doing laundry and cleaning.
She says the three of them survive on her earnings of about 200 shillings KES ($2.10 USD) per day. She pays 800 shillings KES ($8.40 USD) to rent a tiny room in the slum.
Atieno didn’t receive sex education in school. She says sex is not talked about openly here because it is considered an “immoral topic,” according to the religious teachings administered during Christian religious education, a subject taught within the school curriculum.
“I lost my virginity when I was 13, even though I knew nothing much about sex,” she says with her eyes fixed on the ground.
While sex remains a taboo topic in Kenyan and African society as a whole, the increasing rates of HIV, AIDS, sexually transmitted infections, STIs, and teenage pregnancies have prompted teachers to call for formal sex education in schools.
Last month, about 150 students from Fish High School in Kenya’s Coast province were forced to go home after contracting an STI that spread like bushfire within the school, according to a report aired on a local television channel.
In response, nongovernmental organizations, NGOs, have tried to introduce educational programs in schools. Religious authorities vary in their views of sex education, but they agree it should be approached with caution. As society slowly shifts its view, younger parents say they are more open to discussing sex with children than older parents are. The government has not announced any plans to include sex education in the formal school curriculum, and officials tend to shy away from the topic.
About 12 percent of female and 20 percent of male respondents ages 15 to 49 said they had had sexual intercourse by age 15, according to the most recent Kenya Demographic and Health Survey from 2008-2009. Nearly half of females and more than half of males had sex by age 18. Nearly all surveyed knew of at least one method of contraception. More than 13,000 girls drop out of school each year, accounting for 31 percent of all dropout rates among girls here, according to the Forum for African Women Educationalists, a Pan-African NGO.
In Kenya, about half of males and females ages 15 to 24 have comprehensive knowledge of HIV, according to UNICEF. Whereas nearly 65 percent of males in this age group used a condom last time they had sex with a partner they weren’t married to or living with, only 40 percent of females did.
