Educating street children in the Mathare slums

Dear MCFpanairobi friends..

My report this time around is on the challenges we faced in the establishment of the teenage mother’s programme and the learning lessons gained from it. This has been brought forth by the GlobalGiving newest initiative where projects are asked to share their experiences in a project called #FailFoward Stories.

Like we mentioned before in our reports, one and a half years ago, we started a teenage mother’s programme where we targeted girls below 18 years with children below five years. This was informed from a baseline survey on children below five years who loiter within the slums during the day.

The initial recruitment was done during the electioneering period in Kenya after the post-election violence of 2007. During this period, a lot of international and local NGO’s had lots of seminars/workshops and activities that were on- going especially on peace initiatives. These NGOs would provide money for those who attended and there was the first mistake. 4 weeks after recruitment, it dawn on us that the girls were not really attending the vocational training as agreed, the reason; we were not paying them! We had to go back and review our recruitment policy once again that would come up with some guidelines on how we engage the teenage mothers.

The second batch of teenage mother’s that we recruited were mostly sourced from partner organizations that we work with. We got a total of 25 girls of whom half had been referred to us by Community Health Workers (CHWs) who live and work amongst the Mathare slum community. Basically we trusted the CHWs to genuinely refer clients who met the criteria we were looking for but alas, it was not the case. 13 teenage mothers referred to us ended up being not really teenage mothers but women/wives/girlfriends/relatives of the CHWs that had been coached on what to say when we made enquiries. Our capacity then was limited in regard to human resource but luckily we got DKA (an Austrian NGO) that agreed to support the programme and we were able to get an extra social worker to handle the programme. We have been able to find the truth about some of the teenage mothers we recruited. Out of the 13, five have remained while the rest dropped out in the training processes because they had joined for various reasons; because either they had been coerced to do so or because it was free and yet it was not something they were interested in. Of the 5 remaining we agreed they would finish their vocational training although they did not meet the criteria.

Lessons learned
Recruitment process; It was realised when recruiting of the previous group of teenage mothers that certain processes were not keenly followed. This has been rectified with the introduction of a recruitment process after brainstorming that involved both MCFp staff and the teenage mothers themselves.

Counselling; Counselling is the key to success of the program and special attention should be given to any issues raised. Failure to provide time and space to listen to issues raised by the teenage mothers may lead to drop – out. To reduce this, MCFp will embark on provision of counselling, one on one and group counselling every two weeks while the office has an open door policy and teenage mothers can come in anytime for any issue to be addressed.

Family Planning Services; Within the last 6 months, some of the teenage mothers have gone ahead and become pregnant again although they still have young ones below 3 years. To avoid this kind of situations, MCFp has embarked on providing these services through a network of government dispensaries, German Doctors in Mathare and one of MCFp staff members is currently training on reproductive health and family planning issues. The staff member will provide insights to the teenage mothers on ways to reduce unwanted pregnancies amongst the teenage mothers through workshops or seminars.

Refferals; Although we appreciate our networks and partner organizations, there is great need to follow-up the cases and ensure that whatever information we have is factual before the potential client is admitted in the programme.

The teenage mother’s programme continues and we are in the process of recruiting new teenage mother’s for next year phase but this time around. Our experiences will inform the process. Lets see how 2015 will go with the new group of teen mums.

Asante sana for being there for us.