Teen pregnancy epidemic ‘drives’ population boom

Pregnancy in Mozambique up

MURRUPELANE, Mozambique, Aug 13, (Agencies): In the tiny maternity ward in Murrupelane, two 16-year-old mothers breast-feed their babies, both born that morning.

Mozambique’s child marriage and teen pregnancy rates are among the highest in the world, a driving factor in the population explosion in this poverty-plagued southern African nation.

After emerging from a brutal war in 1992, the former Portuguese colony saw its population swell 40 percent in the two decades to 2017, reaching 29 million today.

“My parents really wanted me to get married,” says Julia Afonso, one of the girls who has just given birth in Murrupelane, a village in the north.

In a tiny voice, she says her family received 1,500 meticals ($21, 22 euros) as a dowry.

Around half of Mozambique’s women – 48.2 percent – marry before they turn 18, according to UN children’s agency UNICEF.

Of girls aged between 15 and 19, 46.4 percent are either pregnant or have already become mothers.

These early marriages and pregnancies “are impoverishing the community,” says Murrupelane village chief Wazir Abacar.

Young parents “cannot feed their children, and the mums leave school,” he said. As a result, 58 percent of Mozambican women are illiterate.

Ema Nelmane, now 13, gave into the advances of a man she met in the market who offered her 200 meticals (three euros).

“She saw a chance to get the same shoes her friends were wearing,” her grandmother said, by way of explanation.

When she fell pregnant, Ema was flabbergasted.

“I didn’t know you could get pregnant by making love,” she said, breast-feeding seven-monthold Ismail in the clay yard outside her grandmother’s home.

Ema was plunged prematurely into the world of adults.

“I can’t go out and play with my friends anymore,” she said.

As in other developing countries, teenagers in Mozambique often fall pregnant “through lack of education”, said demographer Carlos Arnaldo.

“Parents see in these births a guarantee that they’ll be looked after when they get old.”

Until recently, Mozambique’s government did little to tackle demographic problems.

But the mounting costs of the population boom have forced a change of thinking.

“The economic consequences for the government are that it has to build hospitals and schools,” said Pascoa Wate, head of maternal and child health at the health ministry.

“In spite of government spending, people don’t have access to them.”

In a bid to curb the population explosion, Mozambique’s government is in the process of changing the law to allow marriage only at 18, rather than at 16 with parental consent.

“We know that the practice of early marriage is rooted in deeplyseated cultural values and social norms that prioritise fertility,” said Youth Minister Nyeleti Mondlane.

With UN support, Mozambique has also been waging a contraception awareness campaign since 2016.

Only a quarter of women currently have access to contraception, according to a national health survey.

In the shadow of a mango tree in the northern village of Namissica, a dozen women crowd around a table to watch a nurse demonstrate how to use different contraception, with the help of a wooden model penis and a plastic vagina.

If their husbands are “not cooperative”, nurse Fatima da Silva Cobre advises women to opt for a birth control implant.

Also: BENI, Congo:

Highlighting the dangers in containing an Ebola outbreak in a war zone, suspected rebels killed seven people in northeastern Congo and sent residents fleeing, an official said.

Global health officials have warned that combating this virus outbreak is complicated by multiple armed groups in the mineral-rich region and a restless population that includes 1 million displaced people and scores of refugees leaving for nearby Uganda every week.

The insecurity means health workers might have to change a vaccination strategy that proved successful in Congo’s previous Ebola outbreak, the World Health Organization’s emergency preparedness chief Peter Salama has said.

The “ring vaccination” approach of first vaccinating health workers, contacts of Ebola victims and their contacts might have to give way to the approach of vaccinating everyone in a certain geographic area such as a village or neighborhood. That would require a larger number of vaccine doses.

Vaccinations began Wednesday in the current outbreak, which was declared on Aug. 1 and has killed 11 people in the densely populated region. WHO has said more than 3,000 Ebola vaccine doses are available in Congo.