‘Don’t dismiss pregnant girls from school’
The Brong-Ahafo Regional Director of the Department of Children, Mr George Yaw Ankomah, has called on heads of basic education institutions to desist from sacking pregnant girls.
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He said Ghana was making efforts to attain gender parity in the education sector, and it was necessary for all stakeholders in education to encourage the girl-child to go to school and continue her education to the higher level just as the boy-child.
Mr Ankomah made the call in an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA) in Sunyani to mark the 2014 African Union Day of the African Child in Sunyani.
The AU Day of the African was instituted by the African Union (AU) and is celebrated on June 16 every year. This year’s celebration is on the theme, “A child friendly, quality, free and compulsory education for all children in Africa”.
Mr Ankomah said there was no clear policy guideline that directed school heads to sack pregnant girls from school, and that the practice by some school heads was assuming an alarming dimension.
Pregnancy, he said, ought not to be a barrier for girls to obtain formal education and that it was an abuse of their right to education.
Mr Ankomah called for a child-friendly approach to fulfilling the right to education for all children in the country.
In 1976, thousands of black schoolchildren marched in a column of more than half a mile long on the streets of Soweto, South Africa, to protect the inferior quality of their education and demanded their right to be taught in their own language.
In the course of the protest, hundreds of young boys and girls were shot by security forces and the then Organisation of African Unity (OAU) instituted the event in memory of the children who were killed.—GNA