'And when they have the baby, they struggle to take care of that baby. The girls start suffering from that point. ‘If a young girl gets pregnant while she is at school, it is actually has a lot of negativity possibilities for her,’ Sia Lajaku-Williams, operations director of Street Child of Sierra Leone told MailOnline. It is one of the biggest ironies for girls like these: the need for education forces them into sex, but in the vast majority of cases pregnancy will end their schooling altogether. School became a thing of the past – another girl dropping out of a system which sees 20 per cent of men reach at least secondary education, compared to just 9.5 per cent of women, according to the UNODC.

No one knew how she was surviving, not even, it seems, the friends who she was staying with.Īnd then the pretence crumbled: Aminata got pregnant, and there was no more hiding. It was to raise my funds to go to school.’Īt school, Aminata was doing her best to pretend like everything was fine. ‘I was on the street, I was engaged in child sex work. ‘I was not feeling good about it, but I had no other option – there was nobody to support me,’ she told MailOnline ahead of the launch of Street Child's new Girls Speak Out Campaign launched today. With that, she had to feed, clothe and put herself through school – buying uniform, books and paying the fees. On a good night she could earn as much as £9, but that meant seeing three clients. Aminata found herself making the choice after her family decided they could no longer afford to support her, and she found herself very much alone.

Tiny tit black girl does a thief