Project to support women in poverty in urban areas

 

Young women in Kpobiman and its environs in the Greater Accra Region will soon benefit from a project which seeks to support deprived women living in poverty in the urban areas.

The Project dubbed: “Young Urban Women (YUW)” which would improve the lives of  2,000 young women  within a period of one and a half years has been jointly embarked upon by the Ark Foundation and ActionAid Ghana in Accra on Monday.

Kpobiman in the Ga West District was chosen because of its higher rate of population in the Greater Accra Region.

The targeted groups for the project include school dropouts, young brides, members of girls’ clubs, young female parliamentarians, school children and others.

The project was first introduced in the Northern Region  and will soon be extended to other regions.

In the Northern Region, ActionAid implemented the “Stop Violence against girls in school project” where they were able to mobilise about 1,000 young girls in school to participate in programmes such as child marriage, corporal punishment and others.

 The Young Urban Women’s Project Manager, Ms Henrietta Lamptey, said the non-governmental organisation instituted the Young Women Parliamentarians programme in Tamale where they enhanced their capacity to challenge certain policies and also gave them the platform to talk about issues such as violence and policies affecting their lives.

 She said a research conducted by the organisation indicated that most young women could not continue their education due to challenges such as teenage pregnancy, poverty, broken homes and others.

Ms Lamptey said the research showed that after tertiary education, acquiring a job became a problem for most women and also household chores were also other constraints.

She said the outcome of the YUW project would ensure that young women had safe and decent work where they could exercise greater control over their incomes.

 “Women would be empowered in all areas of their lives including sexual and reproductive health,” she said.

However, she said, this would enable them to have confidence over challenging situations that they might find themselves in.

The project manager said campaigning would be a technique  that would harness women’s power through the organisation, mobilisation, communication and the demand to achieve objectives.

Women who had low level of education would be equipped with skills such as soap making, bead making, textiles and hairdressing to earn a living.

The Principal Nursing Officer at the Ga West Municipal Health Directorate, Mrs Love Yaa Boadu, encouraged women to access quality reproductive health care, legal or safe abortion and information on birth control methods. 

“There was a need for reproduction health education to ensure safer sex between men and women,” she said.

She also stressed the need to institute and strengthen youth friendly services in schools to provide counselling services for the young people, adding that setting up a youth centre would help to address sexual issues.

She advised young women to delay early sex because having sexual intercourse before age 20 might lead to cervical cancer in future.

 

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