FALSE: This image claiming to show students returning to school with babies after COVID-19 is misleading
The image is from 2018 before COVID-19 started
A Facebook post with an image claiming to show students in Tanzania returning to school with babies after the lifting of restrictions to contain COVID-19 has been taken out of context and is FALSE.
The picture shows girls in school uniform, with some of them carrying infants or holding the hands of toddlers.
Tanzania’s first case of COVID-19 was first confirmed by the Ministry of Health on March 16, three months after the outbreak was reported in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
To limit the spread of the infectious disease, the government ordered the closure of schools, and they remained closed for just over three months, after which President John Pombe Magufuli directed that all learning institutions reopen by June 29.
It is unlikely that any students who may have gotten pregnant during the closure would have gotten pregnant, given that the human gestation period is nine months.
Additionally, a reverse image search shows that the photo was shared alongside a 2018 article on CNN on mandatory pregnancy tests at schools in Tanzania, and is credited to CNN Digital News Producer Ivana Kottasová, who wrote the accompanying article.
The article looked into the aftermath of a policy by President Magufuli that blocked pregnant students from returning to school after giving birth, which had led to the expulsion of the girls in the photo from secondary school.
PesaCheck has investigated an image shared on Facebook claiming to show students with babies returning to school after COVID-19, and finds it to be FALSE.
This post is part of an ongoing series of PesaCheck fact-checks examining content marked as potential misinformation on Facebook and other social media platforms.
By partnering with Facebook and similar social media platforms, third-party fact-checking organizations like PesaCheck are helping to sort fact from fiction. We do this by giving the public deeper insight and context to posts they see in their social media feeds.
Have you spotted what you think is fake news or false information on Facebook? Here’s how you can report. And, here’s more information on PesaCheck’s methodology for fact-checking questionable content.
This fact-check was written by PesaCheck Fact-Checker Najma Juma and edited by PesaCheck Deputy Editor Rose Lukalo.
The article was approved for publication by PesaCheck Managing Editor Eric Mugendi.
PesaCheck is East Africa’s first public finance fact-checking initiative. It was co-founded by Catherine Gicheru and Justin Arenstein, and is being incubated by the continent’s largest civic technology and data journalism accelerator: Code for Africa. It seeks to help the public separate fact from fiction in public pronouncements about the numbers that shape our world, with a special emphasis on pronouncements about public finances that shape government’s delivery of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) public services, such as healthcare, rural development and access to water/sanitation. PesaCheck also tests the accuracy of media reportage. To find out more about the project, visit pesacheck.org.
PesaCheck is an initiative of Code for Africa, through its innovateAFRICA fund, with support from Deutsche Welle Akademie, in partnership with a coalition of local African media and other civic watchdog organizations.
