Efforts to sustain gains made in girls’ education still face challenges such as teen pregnancies.

Clemence Kwizera, a 17-year-old teen mother, for example, dropped out of school in 2019 to have her baby, she never returned.

Kwizera now works as part time domestic worker in her neighbourhood in Gitega, Kigali. “If I return to school, I will not be able to work for my son and my family cannot afford to provide for the both of us. My priority now is giving a better life to my son,” Kwizera says.

With estimated 68,000 cases of teenage pregnancies recorded since 2016, educationists indicate many in Kwizera’s situation could be missing out on school while several other constraints see big numbers of girls enrolling in schools fail to make it into higher levels of education.

Besides, there are constraints linked to social norms that expect girls to do domestic care work, and distractions such period poverty all of which took a toll on girls’ progression in school.

Official statistics suggest that despite overall enrollment rate of girls in primary and ordinary secondary surpassing that of boys over the years, completion rate of female students increasingly drops in higher classes.

For instance, while Ministry of Education data show girls enrollment rate in primary school since 2016 remained 98 per cent and 57 per cent in lower secondary, as opposed to 97 per cent of boys in primary and 48 percent in lower secondary, the curve of girls' progression falls drastically from the lower secondary upwards.

The number of girls in school shrinks even further in upper secondary and tertiary education.

Figures of the 2019 academic year show that only 24,000, of more than 84,000 girls who had enrolled in senior one, reached senior 6.

Rwanda Polytechnique had 10,000 boys and 3,000 girls. “This is a deep rooted issue. Girls’ access to education is still very constrained. The rising number of teenage pregnancies and social norms that still favour boys over girls,” said Annet Mwizerwa, Programme Officer in charge of Adolescent Sexual Reproductive Health and Rights at Health Development Initiative.