Small Acts, Strong Voices: Agency, Dignity, and Informal Feminisms Amongst Adolescent Mothers in Sierra Leone

Adolescent pregnancy in Sierra Leone is widely treated as a developmental crisis, associated with school dropout, poverty reproduction, and moral failure. This article reframes the issue through a womanist lens that emphasizes agency within constraint. Using participatory methods - Photovoice and Peer Ethnography - in Tombo and Mattru Jong, the study points up the lived experiences of adolescent mothers and their strategies of survival and dignity. Findings show that young mothers rely on informal care networks, engage in small-scale trading, reconstruct identities through maternal pride, and navigate institutions through strategic compliance. These everyday acts, though often invisible to policy, represent forms of constrained but meaningful agency. The analysis cautions against romanticizing resilience while revealing the structural violence that demands it. It calls for interventions that recognize adolescent mothers as beyond being recipients of aid; they are also knowledge producers, moral actors, and contributors to community life.