Girls negotiating schooling after pregnancy in rural Zimbabwe

Teenage pregnancy continues to disrupt girls’ schooling in rural Zimbabwe despite the Education Amendment Act (2020), which guarantees readmission after childbirth. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 22 out-of-school young mothers aged 16–19, this study uses an Afro-feminist intersectional framework to examine how pregnancy reshapes educational trajectories within contexts of poverty, moral regulation, and patriarchal authority. The findings show that school exclusion is rarely the result of formal policy alone. Instead, girls’ educational opportunities are shaped by moral judgements about sexual respectability, community surveillance, and the transfer of decision-making power to fathers, husbands, and religious authorities. These relational forms of governance frequently override legal protections, rendering the right to return largely symbolic. At the same time, young mothers continue to pursue education through negotiated and adaptive strategies, including returning for examinations, aligning schooling with seasonal income cycles, sharing childcare with female kin, and combining work with future study. These pathways reflect constrained but persistent aspirations rather than inevitable disengagement. The study argues that school re-entry policies must move beyond legal access to address the social and material conditions that shape educational decision-making. Meaningful inclusion requires financial support, childcare provision, stigma reduction, and flexible learning pathways that recognise young mothers as legitimate learners within their everyday realities.