“Girlhood after Motherhood.”
Teenage Motherhood in Kibera and Mathare
Format: Documentary Photography/film & Visual Research Project
Approach: Documentary Photography, Visual Ethnography, Oral History, and Participatory Storytelling
Location: Kibera and Mathare, Nairobi, Kenya
Project Period: 2021–2026
Photographer & Researcher
📷 Sadat Photo Stories
Research & Storytelling
🖋 The Locals Research & Storytelling Exchange
Community Partner
🤝 Soraya Teen Mums
In Kibera and mathare, some of Africa’s largest informal settlements, teenage pregnancy is not just a statistic—it is a lived reality sometsimes shaped by poverty, gendered violence, cultural expectations or systemic neglect. For many young girls, early motherhood is both a rupture and a reckoning: it disrupts childhood, education, and dreams—but can also become a catalyst for transformation. Soraya, a community organisation led by Habibah Jumah, Document the stories of teenage mothers both in Kibera and mathare.
Project Overview
“Girlhood after Motherhood.” is a documentary photography and visual research project exploring the lived experiences of teenage mothers in Kibera and Mathare, two of Nairobi’s largest informal settlements.
Teenage pregnancy is often discussed through statistics, policy reports, or narratives of crisis. These perspectives, while important, frequently overlook the voices of the young women whose lives they seek to describe. This project begins from a different place: listening to teenage mothers as experts of their own lives.
Developed in collaboration with Soraya Teen Mums, the project documents how young mothers navigate motherhood, education, relationships, work, identity, and community while rebuilding lives that are too often defined by stigma rather than possibility.
Rather than portraying teenage motherhood solely as loss or failure, the project explores the everyday realities of becoming a mother while still negotiating girlhood. It asks how young women create belonging, care for their children, support one another, and imagine futures beyond the circumstances that shaped early motherhood.
Our curiosiity originated from a simple question:
What changes when we begin by listening to young mothers rather than speaking about or for them?
Central Research Question
How do teenage mothers in Kibera and Mathare navigate motherhood, identity, education, community, and aspiration while challenging the social narratives that define their lives?
Project Objectives
The project sought to:
- Document the everyday lives of teenage mothers in Kibera and Mathare.
- Explore motherhood as a lived social, emotional, and cultural experience.
- Examine how young mothers negotiate identity, education, work, and relationships.
- Document community-led models of care, mentorship, and peer support through Soraya Teen Mums.
- Preserve oral histories that contribute to a more nuanced understanding of teenage motherhood.
- Challenge stereotypes that portray young mothers only through vulnerability or failure.
- Build a visual archive that contributes to conversations on gender, youth, reproductive justice, and community resilience.
Research Themes
Girlhood After Motherhood
Motherhood does not end girlhood.
The project explores how young women continue to grow, learn, dream, and discover themselves after becoming mothers. Rather than seeing motherhood as the end of adolescence, it examines how both identities coexist and continually reshape one another.
Soraya offers a sanctuary and a launchpad for teenage mothers. A place where shame is replaced with solidarity and stigma with humour. Here, young women come together not just to survive, but to reimagine themselves as leaders, learners, and narrators of their own lives. Through workshops trainings, mentorship, and creative expressions, Soraya functions as both an emotional refuge and an incubator for second chances.
“I started Soraya because I wanted every teenage mother in Kibera to feel safety, sisterhood and a second chance. Girls call it “ SORAYA,” but what I really get is joy witnessing their becoming.
I believe fiercely in girlhood after motherhood.” Habibah Jumah- Founder and excutive Director, Soraya Teen Mums.
Motherhood and Identity
Becoming a mother transforms relationships with family, community, work, education, and self.
Through portraits, conversations, and weekly observation, the project documents how young women redefine who they are while caring for their children and imagining new futures.
Community, Sisterhood, and Care
Care is rarely experienced alone.
Soraya Teen Mums creates spaces where young mothers exchange knowledge, encouragement, childcare, and emotional support.
The project documents these networks of friendship, mentorship, and collective care that enable young women to navigate motherhood together.
The project asks:
What becomes possible when teenage mothers are surrounded by community instead of judgment?
Education, Leadership, and Second Chances
For many participants, returning to education, developing new skills, and assuming leadership roles represent acts of hope rather than recovery.
The project explores how mentorship, vocational training, creative expression, and community organising become pathways toward personal and economic independence.
Despite growing awareness, many institutional reports still foreground shame, risk, and failure when addressing teen pregnancy—erasing the nuanced, powerful voices of young mothers themselves. This documentations hopes to bridge the significant gap in literature and media that treats girlhood not as a site of damage, but as a landscape of strength, leadership and relational wisdom. By centering lived experiences of girls at Soraya Teen Mums, we learn about their transtional moments, their strengths and the will to keep redifining themselves.
Stigma and Representation
Teenage mothers are often represented through narratives of shame, failure, or dependency.
This project challenges those representations by documenting complexity, humour, confidence, ambition, affection, resilience, and everyday life.
Rather than asking what young mothers have lost, the work asks what they continue to create.
Family, Care, and Intergenerational Relationships
Motherhood reshapes relationships across generations.
The project examines how parents, grandparents, siblings, partners, and children influence young mothers’ experiences while revealing the diverse forms of care that sustain families in informal settlements.
Teeen Mum Stories
Teenage pregnancy in sub-Saharan Africa is deeply entangled with structural poverty, limited access to reproductive health services and gender inequality. Studies have consistently linked high rates of teen motherhood to informal settlements, where girls face overlapping vulnerabilities including economic precarity and sexual violence. In Nairobi’s urban slums, the convergence of overcrowding, parental absence, and transactional sex further intensifies risk. Yet, dominant discourses often individualize the issue, focusing on morality rather than context.
Cynthia Akinyi Pande — Age 19, Mathare
I’m 19, and my child is five years old. He gives me the strength I didn’t know I had.
But home is not always peaceful. Disagreements, arguments—those things drain me. I try to stay hopeful, mostly for him.
Hellen Zindoli — Age 17, KiberaI’m a young mother—just 17—and my child is a year old. Seeing him is enough to make my day.
But I hate being offended, disrespected, or ignored. And nothing hurts me more than the thought of someone harming my child.Hope and Future-Making
Despite uncertainty, many young mothers continue to imagine futures for themselves and their children.
The project documents aspirations for education, employment, entrepreneurship, stable housing, and raising children with opportunities they themselves were often denied.
Hope is understood not as optimism alone, but as a daily practice.
Methodology
The project combined documentary photography with qualitative visual research.
Methods included:
- Long-term documentary photography.
- Visual ethnography.
- Participant observation.
- Environmental portraiture.
- Oral history interviews.
- Life-story conversations.
- Community workshops.
- Reflective field notes.
- Collaborative image-making.
Working over an extended period allowed relationships of trust to develop, creating space for stories that extend beyond public narratives of teenage pregnancy toward richer understandings of everyday life.
Photographic Approach
The photographs privilege intimacy over spectacle.
Rather than focusing on moments of crisis, the project documents ordinary experiences—caring for children, attending workshops, laughing with friends, studying, working, resting, and reflecting.
Portraits are created collaboratively, allowing participants to shape how they wish to be represented.
The camera becomes not simply a recording device but a tool for dialogue, recognition, and shared storytelling.
Rodah Shikuri — Age 18, Kibera
I’m 18, and my son is one year and two weeks old. He is my source of joy, along with my family and my Soraya sisters.
But the thought of someone mistreating him terrifies me. And heartbreak—no, I don’t want to deal with that again.
Elizabeth Aidi — Age 21
I’m 21 and my child is almost two years old. His happiness and health are everything to me.
I don’t like gossip—when people talk behind my back, it hurts. My family lifts me up, but my mother’s illness breaks my heart. She means everything to me.Hellen Zindoli — Age 17, Kibera
I’m a young mother—just 17—and my child is a year old. Seeing him is enough to make my day.
But I hate being offended, disrespected, or ignored. And nothing hurts me more than the thought of someone harming my child.
Outputs
The project culminated in a multidisciplinary body of work, including:
- A documentary photography exhibition.
- Community exhibitions in Kibera and Mathare.
- Editorial photo essays.
- A growing visual archive of oral histories and photographs.
- Educational workshops and public conversations.
- Research publications exploring motherhood, gender, and urban life.
- An online storytelling eco-system amplifying the voices of teenage mothers.
Intended Impact
“Girlhood after Motherhood.” seeks to reshape public understanding of teenage motherhood by placing young mothers at the centre of their own narratives.
Rather than defining them by circumstance, the project recognises them as caregivers, students, workers, daughters, leaders, neighbours, and storytellers whose lives cannot be reduced to a single moment of becoming mothers.
Through documentary photography, visual ethnography, and community-based research, the project contributes to broader conversations on gender justice, reproductive rights, education, and social inclusion while building a lasting visual archive of lived experience.
Ultimately, the work invites audiences to move beyond stereotypes and to recognise that girlhood does not disappear with motherhood. Instead, it continues to evolve—shaped by care, resilience, community, and the possibility of second chances.
“As a documentary photographer rooted in community stories, Through immersive fieldwork, I explored the intersection of motherhood transition, identity and community agency. I am learning that, to truly support teenage mothers in informal settlements, we must do more than intervene. we must listen, care about their truths and then, invest in an action.”
Soraya Stories
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