Socio-Demographic Factors Among Pregnant Teenage Girls Aged 13–19 Years: Evidence from Kimilili Sub County, Bungoma County, Kenya

Teenage pregnancy remains a pressing public health and social challenge in Western Kenya, with Bungoma County recording a prevalence of 19% against a national rate of 15%. Kimilili Sub County, identified as a teenage pregnancy hotspot within the county, has received no prior systematic empirical attention despite the scale of the problem. This paper presents findings on the first objective of a broader mixed-methods study: identifying the socio-demographic factors among pregnant teenage girls aged 13–19 years in Kimilili Sub County. A convergent parallel mixed-methods design was employed. Structured questionnaires were administered to 204 teenage participants (78.5% response rate), complemented by 18 in-depth interviews, six focus group discussions with 34 participants, and key informant interviews with community health volunteers, selected through stratified random and purposive sampling respectively. Quantitative data were analysed descriptively using SPSS version 26; qualitative data were analysed thematically following Braun and Clarke’s (2006) six-phase procedure. Findings showed that pregnancy was concentrated among mid-adolescent girls aged 16–17 years (43.6%), most of whom had incomplete secondary education (35.3%) or lower, lived without both parents (74.5%), and resided in rural areas (69.6%). Four socio-demographic factors were examined using five-point Likert scales: age, educational attainment, family structure, and socio-economic status. All twenty Likert items returned mean scores within the agree range, with peer influence (M = 4.07), school retention as protective (M = 4.19), two-parent family structure as protective (M = 4.13), and poverty restricting access to contraception (M = 4.18) emerging as the most strongly endorsed items in each domain respectively. Qualitative accounts illustrated the specific mechanisms through which these factors operated: reproductive health ignorance rooted in abstinence-only instruction, peer conformity pressure, intergenerational power imbalances, supervisory gaps in non-intact households, and economic dependency on older male partners. The study concludes that socio-demographic vulnerability to teenage pregnancy in Kimilili Sub County is structurally produced through the interaction of these four factors rather than through any single cause, and recommends targeted school retention programmes, comprehensive reproductive health education, and family-strengthening interventions tailored to the sub-county’s rural, low-income context.