A girl grows up in a poor family. She attends a free government primary school where class sizes are large and teaching may be poor. After primary school, she has to drop out to care for her younger siblings as her parents have died from AIDs. She gets pregnant aged 16 by an older man who promises to pay her school fees for secondary school in return for sex. She doesn’t attend antenatal care, and her child is born small. The child is sickly, having contracted HIV from her, and dies at the age of 2 months from pneumonia. The girl gets pregnant again, this time by a local boy, and they get married. This time she attends antenatal care, starts antiretrovirals, and her second child is born HIV negative. Her husband refuses to let her use contraception, and by the time her child is 10 months old, she has…
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