ActionAid Ghana grooms 81 girls
ACTIONAID Ghana has held this year's Annual Northern Regional Girls'Camp in Tamale for 81 girls from three districts of the region with a call on the girls to take advantage of the programme which was designed to make girls from rural communities more assertive.
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The programme would also groom them to be part of the decision making processes in their respective communities and the nation as a whole.
Addressing the participants, who were from the Nanumba North and Bole districts and the Tamale metropolis, the Regional Programme Manager of ActionAid, Madam Esther Boateng, observed that the girls' camp event, which started in 2001, has impacted positively on the psychological and general well-being of the beneficiary girls.
She stated that the event, which is a brainchild of ActionAid, had put many girls on a sound footing to enable them to take up responsible positions in the society.
According to her, the organisation in the past selected 30 girls from each region to Accra to learn from role models and visit places of interest.
However, she said, because of the distance and cost involved in sending the girls from their respective communities to Accra, the annual regional girls' camp was introduced about four years ago to give those in the rural communities a greater chance of participating in the programme.
"We have been monitoring the progress of the girls who benefit from our interventions and we can confidently say that most of them are in responsible positions of the country", Madam Boateng noted.
Ms Benedicta Mohammed of the Nyohini Presbyterian Junior High School in Tamale and Fusheini Abibata of the Evangelical Presbyterian Primary at Bimbilla shared some of their experiences with the Daily Graphic.
They noted that the camp was helpful because apart from enhancing their academic work, it also equipped them with the requisite skills to be able to fit anywhere they found themselves in the world.
The participants were taken through good manners, personal hygiene, sexual reproduction and sexuality, reading skills, among other things.
As part of the event, a reading competition was held for the participants to encourage them to cultivate the habit of reading.
Fatima Alhassan, a Primary Six pupil of the Bole Jugbor Primary School, took the first position followed by Saaka Adiata, Zakaria Memunatu and Fusheini Abibata for the second, third and fourth positions respectively.
The event was on the theme,“Empowering girls through education: securing national development.”
By Vincent Amenuveve/Daily Graphic/Ghana