A
class 14 pupil of the Our lady of Peace Primary School in the Nanumba South District,
Mohammed Shakira has expressed concern over the high rate of teenage pregnancy
in the area and attribute the cause to parents refusal to reprimand their wards
when they go wrong.
She
said children who go out in the night and return late are not punished by their
parents, and this encourages them to engage in such acts to the detriment of
their education.
Ms
Shakira told Fiila News in an interview that, even when citizen vigilantes in
the area want to take matters of such nature up, recalcitrant parents come to
the defense of their wards.
Shakira
was speaking in an exclusive interview with Fiila News over the weekend at the
closing ceremony of the Annual Regional Girls Camp organized by ActionAid and
its partners aimed at empowering young girls to achieve greater heights in
education.
The
one-week camp, on the theme: “Empowering Girls Through Education: Securing
National development”, brought together over 120 girls from basic schools
within three districts in the Northern region.
ActionAid
is an international Non Governmental Organization which operates in Ghana and
other countries in the Africa Sub-region. ActionAid-Ghana uses a rights based
approach that is working within the human rights framework to development to
help build peoples power to hold duty bearers to account, protect the rights of
the poor and vulnerable with the hope of eradicating poverty.
ActionAid
Ghana also invests heavily in education with emphasis on securing girls' and
women's right to education, access for excluded groups, adequate resources for
education, and works to ensure participation, transparency and accountability
in the education sector.
Even
though, issues of teenage pregnancies has been reduced drastically in the area
due to several interventions put in place by ActionAid and its partners,
Shakira said base on the sensitization she has gone through during the one-week
stay in the camp, she will continue to advise her colleagues to refrain from
acts that have the tendencies of jeopardizing their education.
Participants
who were selected by their respective schools at the regional level through
their girl-child officers, were educated on their right to education,
interpersonal relationship, how to build self esteem, and protect themselves
against domestic violence.
The
Nanumba Districts are noted for their high rate of violence against females
ranging from defilement, forced marriage, betrothal and rape among others with
perpetrators often left to walk away free after the act.
Meanwhile,
the project coordinator of “Stop
Violence Against Girls”,
Yakubu Suale indicated that the issue of teenage pregnancies have been reduce
in the over 28 project communities of actionaid and its partners.
He
stated that such issues were prevalent but due to the intervention of actionaid
and its partners such issues have since been nib to the bud.
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