In South Africa, Youth Month carries a particular weight.
It is a time of remembrance and reflection on the unfinished project of building a society that fully includes young people in its present and future. In 2026, this reflection takes on added significance as we mark 50 years since the Soweto Uprising – a moment when young people demanded dignity, equality and quality education. That demand did not end in 1976. It continues today, shaped by new inequalities and a generation navigating systems that were not fully built with them in mind. Among them are thousands of young mothers – who are too often absent from conversations about youth participation, leadership and the future. More often than not, they are framed as a social problem than recognised as young people whose experiences, aspirations and realities form part of the broader story of youth potential in South Africa.
The limitations of our narrative about young moms
“Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanise” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The Danger of a Single Story
Young mothers remain among the most spoken-about and least listened-to people in public life. They are frequently present in policy debates and media narratives but rarely included as participants in those conversations. Public discourse tends to oscillate between two dominant frames: the cautionary tale and the redemption story.
In the first, young motherhood is reduced to statistics, risk and moral concern. In the second, it becomes a story of individual drive and determination and triumph over adversity. Both are incomplete. Both flatten lived experience.
They leave little space for the realities of young mothers’ lives, which are more often marked by ambition alongside exhaustion, care alongside strain, dreams delayed or deferred, social stigma, mounting economic pressure, time poverty and creative solutions, and a quiet resilience that rarely fits neatly into headlines.
Both narratives obscure the structural conditions that shape young women’s lives long before pregnancy and long after it.
We know that motherhood is associated with disrupted education and school dropout, reduced economic opportunity, heightened health risks, and entrenched cycles of inequality and intergenerational poverty.
According to UNFPA South Africa, the adolescent fertility rate (ages 15–19) has declined in recent years, reaching approximately 42 births per 1,000 girls in 2024/25. While this reflects progress in prevention, tens of thousands of adolescent births still occur annually, and the rate remains unacceptably high. It is also accompanied by a concerning trend of pregnancies occurring at increasingly younger ages.
Adolescent pregnancy is therefore not a “behavioural issue”, but a structural reality shaped by intersecting systems of disadvantage. And when young motherhood is framed only through individual responsibility or moral failure, those systems disappear from view.
We lose sight of clinics that are physically accessible but unaccommodating to adolescents’ sexual and reproductive health needs. We miss the economic precarity that constrains decision-making long before a young woman becomes a statistic. We fail to connect persistent gaps in child protection, weak enforcement of laws and under-resourced responses to gender-based violence. We overlook the role of harmful social norms, unequal gender relations and inadequate comprehensive sexuality education that limit young people’s agency. We continue to design education systems that do not accommodate young mothers’ caregiving realities. Most importantly, we don’t recognise young mothers as knowledge-holders with first-hand insight into how these function in practice.
The result is policy and programming that respond to symptoms rather than the systems that produce them.
A different starting point: listening
Often, before a young mother speaks, the story is already in motion: judgement has formed, assumptions have been made, and futures have already been predicted.
This Youth Month, Embrace is choosing a different starting point. Not to romanticise young motherhood, and not to simplify it, but to create space for young mothers to speak in their own words about what they are experiencing, what support actually looks like, and what needs to change.
We will hand over the mic to young mothers and organisations within the Embrace Network working directly on adolescent health, education and youth development. Their stories and perspectives matter because they sit at the intersection of policy and lived reality, where systems either hold or fail. Together, these insights offer evidence of what is happening beyond abstraction and assumption.
Young mothers are already part of the reset
In 2026, the Government’s Youth Month theme, #RESET@50: The Future Calls invites a national dialogue about the challenges facing young people today and their role as co-creators of the future, carrying forward the legacy of 1976.
But a reset cannot be complete while teen mothers remain excluded from narratives of youth potential or the nation building, despite already living the realities that define the country’s most urgent challenges (and future opportunities):unemployment, access to education, gender-based violence and femicide, healthcare gaps, food insecurity, climate change. Young mothers are not waiting for the future; they are already navigating it – rebuilding timelines, adapting to constrained systems, and stepping into caregiving responsibilities earlier than expected. To ignore them in conversations about the future is an oversight.
Young mothers are often viewed through a deficit lens, framed primarily in terms of lack, risk, and failure, rather than those with expertise shaped through lived experience. A growing body of research, including recent work such as the 2026 Maternal Strengths Report, challenges narrow assumptions about mothers and their ability to lead by showing how caregiving can generate new forms of knowledge and skills. These include strategic decision-making, time management and organisation, resource management, communication, negotiation, conflict resolution and adaptability. The research doesn’t argue that motherhood is easy, nor that mothers should be expected to do it all, least of all adolescent mothers, but it does show howmothers develop new capabilities while navigating systems not designed for caregiving realities.
The dual identity of young mothers
“Early pregnancy presents multifaceted challenges for girls: their childhood experience is suddenly over, but they are still not afforded the respect and authority given to adults” – Katie Januario (Hilton Foundation)
Being both a young person and a caregiver requires navigating multiple systems at once: education, healthcare, early childhood development, transport, social protection and employment.
Through this, young mothers develop valuable knowledge of what systems work, where the gaps are, and what support is missing. Their insights offer critical evidence for how services, programmes and policies can be better aligned with communities’ everyday realities.
The Young Mothers Consortium is a multi-country initiative in Kenya, Mozambique and Tanzania, supported by the Hilton Foundation, working through community-based partners, participatory grant making, and narrative change to shift power and resources towards young mothers. A key learning from the Consortium is that young mothers are strategic actors within complex systems and that when given resources and support (particularly through education, childcare, safe spaces, basic needs provision and enterprise development programmes), they demonstrate economic ambition, collective organisation, and a strong commitment to improving outcomes for their children.
Closer to home, a longitudinal cohort study of more than 1,000 adolescent mothers in the Eastern Cape, conducted between 2017 and 2023, identified three key “accelerators”: food security, non-violent parenting support, and healthcare that treats young mothers with dignity and respect. These were associated with lower risk of depression and suicidality, reduced exposure to intimate partner violence and age-disparate or transactional sexual relationships, reduced HIV risk, as well as improved education retention and employment, alongside stronger self-confidence. The study was participatory, with adolescent mothers involved in shaping the design, analysis, and framing of the findings. This research suggests that many solutions already exist within current systems; the challenge is ensuring they reach young mothers in a way that is adolescent-friendly, non-judgemental and integrated.
Representation matters
The representation of young mothers is not merely a communications issue. When young mothers’ voices and experiences are oversimplified, interventions become misaligned. This is why campaigns that deliberately disrupt silence and stigma around young motherhood are important. Visibility and nuance are a precondition for robust and comprehensive support systems that are grounded in lived reality and respond more effectively to actual needs.
The stories we tell about young mothers shape the possibilities we imagine for them, the opportunities we are willing to create, and the extent to which they are able to co-create the South Africa they and their children will inherit.