The wisdom of scholarships for virgins

I would like to revisit a post from a couple of months ago. I wrote about a local ‘scholarships-for-virgins’ scheme that was aimed at keeping teenage girls chaste and free from HIV.

A brief refresher from my earlier post before I continue:

“In the Biriwa Disrict in northern Sierra Leone, the Biriwa Youth Association for Development (BYAD) claims it has a hundred university scholarships to offer teenage girls who can prove to a community nurse that they are virgins.

The group feels it is a way of curbing teenage pregnancies which is alarmingly high in the region. According to the National Aids Secretariat the district also clocks the highest number of HIV infections in the country.”

I bring this up again because I recently read UNICEF’s 2009 Out-of-school report for Sierra Leone and was disturbed by one of their findings. It says that in the Kailahun and Makeni districts of the country young women were being forcefully impregnated by their male peers as a punishment for receiving opportunities to further their education. I quote from the report:

NGOs working in Kailahun communities have apparently recorded cases, where girls were raped by their male classmates (resulting to pregnancies) because of the “unfair” benefits the girls received from the scholarship programmes.

Are the local authorities getting it wrong? I’ve been reading reports of similar initiatives in other African countries like Uganda and Nigeria but nothing that evaluates their success in either controlling teenage pregnancies or empowering young women.

According to UNICEF, rather than keep girls in school, these scholarship programmes are offering them up for sexual intimidation. Very often these offenses go unreported because of poor understanding of the law.

Do these financial chastity belts work or are they keeping more children out of school? By offering scholarships for chastity are local do-gooders perpetuating the victimization of young women in this country? Unfortunately I don’t know the answers to these questions. I hope someone does.