Pressure is mounting on Zimbabwe to allow girls under the age of 18 to access sexual and reproductive health services without parental consent, as new data exposes the scale of adolescent pregnancies, unsafe abortions and child marriages across the country.
Teenagers currently account for between 21 and 33 percent of all antenatal bookings nationwide, but public health experts warn the true scale of adolescent pregnancy is significantly higher, as many cases go unregistered.
Advocacy groups including the Access Task Force are pushing Parliament to allow girls under 18 to receive contraception, HIV prevention and counselling services based on their maturity rather than their age alone.
Under current law, anyone below 18 is generally considered unable to consent to these services, leaving health workers legally unable to assist minors without a parent or guardian’s approval.
“The statistics don’t tell the full story”
Public health expert Thabiso Sibanda, speaking on This Morning on Asakhe, a daily current affairs programme on X hosted by CITEZW, said the headline figures on adolescent pregnancies capture only a fraction of the reality.
“The 20 to 33 percent of antenatal bookings between the ages of 15 and 19 are only capturing facility recordings and registered pregnancies,” she said. “There are a lot of pregnancies that happen outside facilities that are not registered.”
The recorded figures are alarming enough. Sibanda cited data showing that 0.2 percent of antenatal bookings involved girls aged between 10 and 14, a share that translated to 9,070 pregnancies in that age group. Adolescents below the age of 16 account for 17 percent of maternal mortality.
Some pregnancies in that age group end in unsafe abortions, she added, exposing young girls to serious and sometimes fatal health risks.
“This is not about encouraging children to have sex”
Sibanda was emphatic that the debate should not be framed as an attempt to normalise sexual activity among minors.
“The conversation should not be about encouraging children to have sex. It should be about adolescents who are already sexually active, those vulnerable to coercion and those at risk of unintended pregnancy being able to access healthcare services,” she said.
She argued that girls seeking services at health facilities were already in need of help, and that turning them away served no protective purpose.
“No one goes to a health facility looking for services they do not want. They will be going there for help,” she said.
Sibanda also made the case that allowing minors access to contraception could become a tool for identifying child abuse.
“If a 15-year-old comes to get a contraceptive, you would expect the service provider to do a risk assessment, why is this young person seeking these services? Is this consensual? This could be a pathway for tracking sexual abuse,” she said.
A legal grey area
SRH advocate and social worker Dumisani Ngwenya said the legal framework governing minors’ access to health services remains contradictory and poorly understood, even by health workers.
He said the Public Health Act, under Section 35, ties access to services to a person having “legal capacity” but does not specify an age. Medical practice has generally treated 16 as the threshold, he said, but amendments to other statutes have since set legal capacity at 18, creating confusion.
“As a result, the law is sending conflicting signals to health workers on the ground,” Ngwenya said.
He pointed to the National Health Client Charter, which states that anyone who presents at a health facility should receive a service, with no age qualification attached.
“It doesn’t state an age. It says anyone who knocks should get a service,” he said.
Zimbabwe has one of the highest rates of child marriage in sub-Saharan Africa. The country’s Constitutional Court banned child marriage in 2016, but implementation gaps and deep-rooted social norms continue to expose adolescent girls to early pregnancy and its associated health risks.
Parliament has yet to act on advocacy groups’ calls to amend the law.
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