Intensify sex education to contain teenage pregnancies
A group of women in the Upper West Region have called for the intensification of sex education in the three northern regions to contain the rising spate of teenage pregnancies and school dropouts.
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The women said the seeming myth about sex had prevented such discussions between parents and children, and had resulted in the painful experience of teenage pregnancy and its attendant consequences.
At a forum in Wa organised by Pagba Saha Foundation, a non-governmental organisation based in the three northern regions, which champions issues of maternal health, participants identified culture as one of the challenges battling against efforts to reduce teenage pregnancies in the area.
The forum, which was organised in collaboration with Star Ghana, a multi-donor funded non-governmental organisation, collated views also on causes and prevention of maternal deaths from participants drawn from various backgrounds, including the media, traders, entrepreneurs and professionals from the health and teaching fields.
Strategy
They said the strategy of keeping young girls at home when they showed signs of physical development had failed to yield the desired results since eventually they had to go to school or run errands.
“Even if you follow her to the stream, she could have sex with somebody and return with you without your knowledge,” one contributor said.
“What the girl-child needs is education on the consequences of sex; otherwise she will find out or learn from the wrong source or indulge in it before knowing the truth,” she said.
Another said teenage pregnancy should be blamed on parents for their failure to educate their daughters on a subject that growing children were curious about.
“In northern Ghana, it is a taboo to talk about sex with young girls, but that is no guarantee of their abstinence,” another woman said. “They would experiment or listen to others and attempt to practice eventually if they are not educated properly at home.”
One more said sex education should be concentrated on girls since they were always the victims of the act.
Maternal deaths
On maternal deaths, they mentioned failure to attend antenatal clinics due to various reasons including poverty, lack of access to antenatal clinics, transportation challenges, attitude of health professionals, ignorance, among others, as chief reasons for maternal deaths in the northern region.
They explained that hostile reception by hospital staff, frightening experiences of relatives and friends at the hospitals and clinics, indifference to modern trends and poverty generally were responsible for the maternal deaths they had witnessed.
The Chief Executive of Pagba Saha Foundation, Hajia Sawuratu Alhassan, said the views collated from the women would help in designing appropriate programmes to sensitise women and women’s groups in various communities in the Northern, Upper East and Upper West regions to reproductive health.