The study identified socio-cultural practices among the pogoro community that hinder girls’ retention in public secondary schools in Ulanga District-Morogoro-Tanzania. There was deficiency of information on reviewed studies on exact elements of socio-cultural practices which accelerate dropout of female students in Ulanga District. The study was guided by Ruth Pearson theory based on the framework of gender relations. The study adopted concurrent triangulation research design, which is one of the mixed method approach model. Purposive sampling, simple randomly sampling and stratified sampling were used to establish sample size from the target population for the study. The content validity of instruments was assured while reliability of the data collection tool was ensured by Pearson product moment coefficient of r=0.7825. The quantitative data was analyzed by using descriptive statistical by the use of statistical package of social sciences (SPSS) software version 25. While qualitative data was analyzed thematically. The study revealed that early pregnancy and economic status of the parents were the major factors that hindered girls' retention in secondary school. Other factors included initiation rites, traditional negative attitudes towards girls' education, traditional festival such as sangura, parental lazier fare and frequent family conflicts or breakages. The study recommended that the government should formulate affirmative policy that would protect female students against such discriminative practices, construct of girls' hostel, creating awareness among parents on the rights and benefits of education to female students, provision of sanitary towels to girls as measures to address the lack of retention of girls in secondary schools.