The plight of young girls: school re-entry for pregnant schoolgirls and young mothers in Techiman, Ghana

Despite the re-entry education policy which allows pregnant schoolgirls to re-enter school to continue their education as part of efforts to eliminate gender disparity in education, preg-nant schoolgirls and young mothers’ education have not been fully achieved. Young mothers are still out of school unable to complete their primary and secondary education due to in-stitutional and socioeconomic factors such as poverty which intersect with discriminatory gender ideologies to make re-entry difficult. The empirical evidence was drawn from the experiences of young mothers, alongside the views of head teachers, parents, and officials of the Girls Education Unit under Ghana Education Service (GES) in Techiman, Ghana, to investigate the factors mitigating young mothers school re-entry. The study reveals how ma-terial and emotional conditions such as poverty, child-care support, parental support, and attitude, interact with institutional terrain barriers and gender ideologies in the community to hinder young mothers’ education. The research findings refer to the need of the GES to adopt an intersectional approach to tackle socio-economic conditions such as poverty in the household, discriminatory gender roles and ideologies in communities, to promote young mothers’ school re-entry.