Program for Teenage Mothers: Our Mabinti Project
The Mabinti Project was created to educate, support and empower young women who have experienced the crisis of unplanned pregnancy and the difficulties related to it. The aim of this project is to prevent abortion, early pregnancy, and the isolation of young women who experience early pregnancy in Tanzania.
Our Mission
Our mission is to empower young pregnant women to avoid unsafe abortions and provide education for preventive measures to avoid early motherhood. Our focus includes helping young mothers maintain a salary, become independent and address a significant community problem many young women face in Tanzania. We are an operating NGO, meaning we plan and carry out boots-on-the ground projects to accomplish our objectives. This requires a great deal of careful planning, communication, and local involvement to ensure our project’s success. Additionally, focused efforts also include preventing early pregnancies and reducing adolescent pregnancy rates by promoting sexual reproductive health education.
Our Vision
To bring community and stakeholders together to ensure there is a safe environment where our teens can make healthy decisions for their well-being, lives and careers.
The Mabinti Project was created to educate, support and empower young women who have experienced the crisis of unplanned pregnancy and the difficulties related to it. The aim of this project is to prevent abortion, early pregnancy, and the isolation of young women who experience early pregnancy in Tanzania.
Good Hope is still in dire need of funding in order to realize this beautiful project. Please find below our brief project proposal. As part of Mabinti Project we have started with tailoring training classes for teenage mothers. The young mothers learn from a kind and patient tailor how to sew dresses, blouses, and trousers. Also, our Mabinti (Teenage Mothers), are sewing durable and environmentally friendly sanitary pads: the Binti Pads.
Please feel free to contact us if you are interested in supporting our project proposal.
Good Hope seeks to expand its scope by starting the Mabinti Project, which seeks to support teenage mothers and provide access to education and equal opportunities for them. In government schools, teenage girls undergo unannounced pregnancy tests, and any girl found to be pregnant will be expelled immediately. Our preliminary study with 36 teenage mothers has shown, that around 50% of the girls were expelled in the year of their final examinations, with no chance to finish the governmental middle-school education. As a result, teenage mothers face double oppression: by the schooling system that seeks to “educate children, not mothers,” and by their communities that reject the girls for their early pregnancy. This leads to much higher risk of poverty for the teenage mothers and their children. Good Hope will pioneer the first holistic intervention for teenage mothers in Moshi.
GOALS AND OBJECTIVES
Our Mabinti Program aims to counter stigmatization and resulting poverty of teenage mothers and their children. Our social rehabilitation and education program addresses 20 teenage mothers from Moshi from the age of 17 to 20 who dropped out of the final or penultimate school year of middle school (Form 3 or Form 4). We seek to:
- Re-integrate cast-out teenage mothers in their families in order to strengthen teenage mothers’ social fabric and create a caring family environment
- Boost teenage mothers’ confidence, self-awareness and life-skills to repair emotional damage that has been done, counter stigmatization, prevent further emotional and physical exploitation, and create a vision for the young women’s future
- Provide childcare for the 20 children of the teenage mothers in order to provide early childhood education, as well as time and space for teenage mothers’ schooling
- Enable 20 teenage mothers to finish their middle-school education in order to strengthen their position in society and future employment perspectives
INTERVENTIONS
By the end of our 24-month pilot project, we will have achieved the following measures:
- We will hire five staff members: a female program manager and a female social worker who specialize in family counselling/GBV/gender equality; we will hire one secondary school teacher and two kindergarten teachers who believe in our vision of non-violent communication and violence free education.
- We will provide on-site day-care for the 20 children of the teenage mothers in our program.
- In the first year: Provide on-site schooling in 5 core courses, 7 hours per day, 5 days per week for our teenage mothers to catch up with topics that they missed out during government school education and repeat content that they have forgotten during the one to three years they had to stay at home.
- In the second year: Provide a school scholarship to finish middle-school within one year at a QT training center with extra tuition at Good Hope to ensure successful middle-school graduation
- Provide breakfast and lunch for teenage mothers and their children for five days per week
- Provide 24, two-day workshops (once per month) on twelve life-skills topics such as:
self-development, reproduction, gender equality and rights, conflict resolution, parenting, health and nutrition, family finances and careers. The workshops will be conducted by external specialists for each topic.
EXPECTED RESULTS
Whereas governmental prevention programs solely promote abstinence, Good Hope provides the first holistic intervention for teenage mothers in Moshi. After completing the 2-year program, the teenage mothers will live in a supportive family environment and have a better position in society, as they are no longer secondary school drop-outs. The young women will have finished middle-school, acquired the necessary life-skills to avoid abusive situations and developed a plan for their future. The program’s goal is to help the young mothers develop necessary qualifications to either find employment or start a business themselves in order to earn money and provide for their family. The risk of a life in poverty for the mothers and their children, and the risk of living in an abusive or forced relationship will decrease by 80 percent.