Abstinence campaign yields results
Nambre is a town that has many young people. Most of these young people, especially the girls, had become school drop-outs all because they got pregnant while still schooling.
After giving birth, most of these girls were reluctant to return to school for fear of being teased by their mates and secondly because they had to work to fend for themselves as well as the babies because their parents and the men responsible for the pregnancies refused to shoulder the responsibility.
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Sister Ethel was a nun and a medical officer at the Saint Francis Hospital in Nambre. Over the past decade, since she was posted on transfer to the hospital, she had observed the alarming rate at which the teenage girls in the town had been getting pregnant and, consequently, dropping out of school.
Each year, she observed that only about five girls from the town were able to write and pass the Basic Education Certificate Examination(BECE) and consequently enter senior high school.
She was concerned that if the situation continued, the town would not have any highly educated girl. She, therefore, resolved to establish a youth friendly corner in the clinic to offer counselling to adolescent girls who got pregnant.
The counselling was on how they could regain their confidence to return to school. She also counselled those who had not yet started having sex on the importance of remaining chaste.
Sister Ethel’s work took her to the two main basic schools in the town and various traditional durbars where she advocated abstinence among young people.
She insisted that it was beautiful for girls to remain more chaste than to engage in pre-marital sex because with that they could be able to realise their future dreams. She said they could become the doctors, nurses, lawyers, among other professionals, they so much admired.
She informed them of the adolescent health corners in various health centres and how they could access their services for any advice or clearing their doubts on misconceptions they had about their sexual and reproductive health issues.
For young girls who are unable to remain chaste and also get pregnant, Sister Ethel encouraged them to go back to school after giving birth or to learn a trade in order that their future dreams would not die with the pregnancy.
Through the durbars, she spoke against the habit of stigmatising teenage girls who got pregnant, emphasising that it was the reason why most of them found it difficult to return to school .
The campaign was well received by the adults of the town and the queenmother, Nana Essumanba II, especially joined in the abstinence campaigns.
Sometimes, great women professionals were even invited to talk to the girls. For those teen mothers, adults who had fallen victim to it while growing up but went back to school after giving birth, were also invited to advise them.
Eventually, the message got down to the young boys and girls and so they stopped engaging in unsafe sex. This helped to drastically reduce the high school drop out rate among girls in the town. No wonder, two years after Sister Ethel’s abstinence campaign, and for the first time, Nambre had a record number of girls being admitted to senior high school.
Issabella Yeboah.