Global Public Health · Published 2026-07-28 · DOI 10.1080/17441692.2026.2697093
Ndumiso Daluxolo Ngidi, Deevia Bhana, Vimbai Sharon Matswetu
This article rethinks teenage pregnancy in rural Zimbabwe through a decolonial Afro-feminist lens, foregrounding the lived narratives of 26 teenage mothers in Shamva. Rather than pathologising their experiences or framing early pregnancy as a failure of knowledge or morality, we conceptualise the notion of a reproductive pipeline—a system through which poverty, gendered power, inadequate healthcare, and emphasised femininity converge to constrain girls’ reproductive autonomy. The analysis reveals how early pregnancy is produced through a reproductive pipeline where poverty, patriarchy, kinship expectations and clinic gatekeeping constrain girls’ agency with reduced capacity to negotiate safe sex and better social, educational and health outcomes. Afro-feminist theory helps illuminate how girls exercise constrained agency within histories of colonial dispossession and contemporary moral economies that value sexual silence and respectability over autonomy and care. Girls’ efforts to resist through withholding sex, seeking contraception, or rejecting unsafe abortions are often blocked by economic, relational and institutional obstacles. These findings call for interventions based on reproductive justice rooted in African epistemologies, structural analysis, and care ethics. African girls in rural Zimbabwe, we argue deserve the right to choose and to imagine futures beyond coerced maternity and structural abandonment.
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Ngidi, N., Bhana, D., Matswetu, V. (2026). ‘I Did Not Choose This’ : teenage girls and the reproductive pipeline in rural Zimbabwe. Global Public Health. https://doi.org/10.1080/17441692.2026.2697093