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Luther Dennis Nii Antieye Addy (5th from right), Field Officer of Planned Parenthood Association of Ghana, and Antoinette Da-Rocha (4th from right), Project Coordinator of PPAG, with some stakeholders at the meeting. Picture: ESTHER ADJORKOR ADJEI
Luther Dennis Nii Antieye Addy (5th from right), Field Officer of Planned Parenthood Association of Ghana, and Antoinette Da-Rocha (4th from right), Project Coordinator of PPAG, with some stakeholders at the meeting. Picture: ESTHER ADJORKOR ADJEI

PPAG urges support for girls' empowerment project

The Plan Parenthood Association of Ghana (PPAG) is rallying support from stakeholders and opinion leaders to help its adolescent girls' empowerment project.

The UNFPA/Global Affairs Canada-funded project, which began in 2019, seeks to empower young girls with sexual reproductive health information for quality life by educating them in their schools and communities.

The field officer for PPAG, Luther Dennis Nii Antieye Addy, who made the call, said although they had received support from some stakeholders, there were some communities and schools which refused to accept them, making it a challenge to the success of the project.

“Sometimes, it is difficult to get access to some of the public schools to visit and educate the children and so we plead with them to receive us with open arms in order to see to the success of this project,” he said

Mr Antieye Addy added that getting facilitators to help with the education was also a challenge to them.

He said those the association initially had, had moved into other ventures with some furthering their education, hence, “we call on the stakeholders such as the chiefs and the assemblymen to help with getting facilitators to educate the girlchild on reproductive health”.

Youth friendliness

The Project Officer for PPAG, Antionette Da-Rocha, said the overall goal of the project was to empower girls through the provision of, and access to gender-responsive comprehensive sexuality education and youth-friendly sexual reproductive health services.

She added that the objectives of the programme was to improve access to youth-friendly and gender-sensitive comprehensive sexuality education, to improve access to quality, youth-friendly and gender-sensitive sexual and reproductive health services and to increase capacities and favourable environment for adolescent girls to enjoy their sexual and reproductive health rights.

Mrs Da-Rocha also explained that the key activities and strategies the project sought to implement were to train service providers on youth friendliness and gender-sensitive essential sexual reproductive health (SRHR) services for adolescent girls which would be conducted by PPAG and the Ghana Health Service (GHS).

Another key activity, she said, was to organise community breaking the silence forums on sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), inequalities, girls’ empowerment, gender responsiveness and SRHR issues.

“Again, our key activity is to organise free SRHR service delivery outreaches in communities treatment, HIV testing, contraceptives services, counselling and to form and support adolescent pregnant and parenting teen groups”, she said.

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