FALSE: Image claiming to show students returning to school with babies after COVID-19

06/

FALSE: Image claiming to show students returning to school with babies after COVID-19 is misleading.

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,since that was a photo taken back in 2018 before COVID-19 started.

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.

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,and this action prompted PesaCheck who investigated an image shared on Facebook claiming to show students with babies returning to school after COVID-19, and finds it to be FALSE.

Another fact is that a reverse image search shows that the photo was shared alongside a 2018 article on CNN on mandatory pregnancy tests at schools in Tanzania.

This message is brought to you by Sky fm in collaboration with  Code For Africa’s iLab Data Journalis Program supported by DW Akademie