It has now been laid bare that 53,415 adolescent pregnancies were recorded at health facilities between January and July 2026, including 1,501 among girls aged 10–14 years.
For some time, the national conversation has centred on keeping girls in school, promoting sexual and reproductive-health education, addressing the socio-economic vulnerabilities that increase their risk, and strengthening parental supervision.
These interventions remain important.
Yet, after years of discussing the girls, perhaps it is time to ask a different question: Who are the men?
When a 12-year-old becomes pregnant, we rightly ask questions about her welfare, education and future.
But where is the person who had sex with the child?
Was he identified, reported, arrested, investigated, prosecuted or convicted?
If he remains free, who is protecting the next child?
Under Ghanaian law, sexual intercourse with a child under 16 constitutes defilement, whether or not the child consented.
Upon conviction, it carries seven to 25 years’ imprisonment.
In any serious country, a pregnancy involving a 10-, 11-, 12-, 13- or 14-year-old should trigger more than an antenatal response.
It should trigger a child-protection and justice response. We should be losing sleep over these numbers.
Future reports
Future reports should not simply tell us how many teenage pregnancies occurred.
While protecting children’s privacy, they should also indicate how many cases involving children under 16 were reported to the police, how many suspects were identified or arrested, how many were prosecuted, how many resulted in convictions and how many remain pending.
If we can count pregnancies, we should be able to count the justice response too. Identification matters.
If a perpetrator is never identified, he remains in the community and may abuse another child.
If cases are quietly settled within families, the state may never know that a potential offender exists.
Institutions cannot connect information to protect other children, and repeated abuse continues without restraint.
This is why Ghana should seriously consider a properly regulated national sex-offender register for people convicted of specified sexual offences.
A convicted offender may eventually leave prison.
How safe are the children who cross his path?
A carefully designed register could help schools, churches and other authorised institutions conduct appropriate safeguarding checks on staff who work with children.
While we ask who the men are, another question cannot be ignored: What about the boys?
Pregnancy makes sexual abuse of girls visible.
Boys can be abused without any pregnancy announcing that something happened.
What happens to the boy who is sexually abused and told to keep quiet?
What happens when the perpetrator is a relative, teacher, respected community member or someone the family depends upon?
What happens when protecting family reputation becomes more important than protecting the child?
Boys who are abused may grow up carrying trauma, silence and harmful patterns that can be transmitted across generations.
If we cannot adequately address the obvious, what happens to abuse that is not obvious?
Let it never be said that because ours is a man’s world, men were not fighting hard enough to protect children from other men who abuse them.
Visible
Men must not only be discussed as potential perpetrators.
They must also be visible as protectors, reporters, witnesses and defenders of children.
Some men are proudly doing this, but many more must join them.
These numbers do not represent merely teenage mothers.
They represent the future.
So, while Ghana counts the pregnancies, let us count the protection response too. How many cases were identified?
How many perpetrators remain unidentified?
If we count only children made visible through pregnancy, we may be seeing only the tip of the iceberg.
A responsible nation must do more than count victims.
It must find perpetrators, protect vulnerable children, confront hidden abuse and break the cycle before another child becomes a statistic.
It could be my child or yours.
The writer is a Child development expert/Fellow, Zero-To-Three Academy, USA.
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