The Social Navigation of Teenage Pregnancy and Motherhood in Adonkia, Sierra Leone

Massaquoi, Hamida (2025) The Social Navigation of Teenage Pregnancy and Motherhood in Adonkia, Sierra Leone. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

In much of the research in sub-Saharan Africa, teenage pregnancy is depicted as a stumbling block to education and as a social and public health concern, often leading to moral panic. While public health and development research on teenage pregnancy in contemporary Sierra Leone is well established, a gap persists in understanding how families process, manage and resolve the uncertainty associated with these concerns in the context of moral, religious and cultural value systems set against a backdrop of poverty and social change.

This thesis is based on eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork in Adonkia, a semi-urban community in Sierra Leone’s Western Rural Area, where I collected the life-history narratives of 14 girls experiencing early pregnancy and motherhood and carried out participant observation and semi-structured interviews with the girls, their families, and healthcare workers, religious leaders and NGO workers.

Drawing on Whyte’s (1997) understanding that misfortune is rooted in uncertainty, I frame the public health concerns and the process of social reproduction as these relate to teenage pregnancy outside marriage as ‘reproductive misfortune’ to explore how individuals respond to, navigate and make sense of unexpected pregnancy among teenage girls and the contingencies and challenges that arise at various stages of their pregnancy and motherhood.

This lens reveals that these concerns are locally interpreted and managed through flexible cultural practices and religious value systems associated with kinship support and social relations. I use the concept of social navigation to consider how the girls process internal and external perceptions and expectations as they strive towards social reproduction and respectability through ‘good’ mothering and to fulfil their educational aspirations in a context of uncertainty.

I also employ the concept of gendered performativity to examine how the girls navigate, negotiate and express their femininities and sexual expectations in relation to social gender norms and sexual relationships as they transition to motherhood and adulthood.

The central findings of this thesis offer an in-depth understanding of the three temporal stages: early pregnancy, during pregnancy and motherhood. The early stages of pregnancy reveal the religious and social interpretations and the fears attached to reproductive misfortune, which determine how their families choose to support their young pregnant daughters. I argue that during pregnancy and the subsequent stages of motherhood, uncertainty and reproductive misfortune are mitigated through various means of negotiation, coping and social navigation. The girls overcome uncertainty in their pursuit of a better life for themselves and their children by relying on kinship support, holding men accountable, finding divine purpose and meaning in adversity, and striving to fulfil their aspirations for the future.

This thesis challenges the public health narrative on teenage pregnancy centred around negative health and socio-economic outcomes by exploring the phenomenon from an anthropological perspective. It draws attention to the importance of kinship support and the complexities girls experience as the navigate competing discourses about their sexuality, age and identity as young mothers while striving to complete their education.

The thesis contributes to the growing body of literature on teenage pregnancy and motherhood across sub-Saharan Africa into the fields of anthropology, African studies, public health, and development studies.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Global Development (formerly School of International Development)
Depositing User:	Chris White
Date Deposited:	18 Dec 2025 11:12
Last Modified:	18 Dec 2025 11:12
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/101459
DOI:

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