Image from 2018 shows girls in Tanzania who were expelled from school for falling pregnant
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on March 15, 2021 at 15:26
- Updated on March 15, 2021 at 15:51
- 3 min read
- By James OKONG'O, AFP South Africa
Copyright © AFP 2017-2025. Any commercial use of this content requires a subscription. Click here to find out more.
The post was published on March 2, 2021, by a Facebook page called Newsroom Uganda, which has more than 56,000 followers. It had changed its name from Kefa Images Ug in June 2020, according to the social network’s transparency data.
“Kololo Secondary School S.3 students reporting back to school,” the post’s caption reads.
Kololo Secondary is a school in Uganda’s capital, Kampala.
The image in the post shows a line of young women in blue uniforms carrying and walking with children.
On March 20, 2020, all schools in Uganda were closed in a bid to contain the spread of Covid-19, even though the country had not reported any cases of the disease at the time.
Classes finally resumed almost a year later on March 1, 2021.
Photo from CNN story
A reverse image search led to a CNN investigation from November 2018 about Tanzanian girls being expelled from school after getting pregnant.
Tanzania’s schools routinely force girls to undergo intrusive pregnancy tests and permanently expel those who are pregnant, in some cases placing them under arrest.
The same girls in the image used in the false Facebook claim can be seen at 2’16’’ in the CNN video. The clip accompanies an online report about the World Bank revoking a planned $300 million educational loan to Tanzania over the country’s policy of banning pregnant girls from going to school.
A link within the online report opens up a related article by the American broadcaster, where the image is featured in its original form, with the caption: “Young women dressed in uniform walk their children to daycare before attending trades courses at the Faraja Center, a shelter for vulnerable women.”
The Faraja Center in the Tanzanian city of Arusha provides vocational training for vulnerable women, many of them young mothers expelled from school because of their pregnancies. Images and videos from the centre’s website show its students wearing the same blue uniforms.
This is not the case at Kololo Secondary, where pupils wear maroon sweaters, white shirts or blouses, and grey pants or skirts.
AFP Fact Check previously debunked another claim with the same photo here.
Is there content that you would like AFP to fact-check? Get in touch.
Contact us
