The Wa Municipal Youth on Board (YoB)’s Voices of Youth Coalition (VoYC) has called for a change in the school environment and the development of appropriate infrastructure conducive to the enrollment and learning of teenage mothers.
The YoB project is an initiative by the Youth Opportunities and Transformation in Africa (YOTA), an ECOSOC-accredited Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) at the forefront of youth development, in partnership with 100% For The Children, an international NGO, with funding support from Civil Society for Development Fund (CISU), an association of Danish Civil Society Organizations (CSOs).
The project aims at engendering youth voices to advocate in response of the effects of Covid-19 on Ghana’s education to ensure that critical issues of access and quality that have been escalated by the pandemic receive increased attention and investment.
The call to affirm the Government of Ghana’s educational policy to re-enrol teenage mothers in school, the “Back to School” campaign, was contained as part of recommendations following research conducted by the YoB to back its campaign.
Speaking at a validation workshop to disseminate the research report in Wa, the President of the YoB, Miss Rahinatu Haruna said there was a need to ensure a change in the school environment and provision of adequate infrastructure and learning materials to sufficiently support the re-enrolment process.
Other recommendations were a call on key decision makers to: “collaborate and form vibrant clubs in schools involving females and educating them on how to protect themselves; educate the public on adolescent reproductive health and the effects of discrimination and teasing.
“Sensitize victims and their families on the need to re-enrol and provide financial or material support for the upkeep of their unplanned babies, and educate students and the general public more on the re-enrollment policy.”
Some others were: “Provide sanitary pads and other sexual health kits to school; extend the school feeding program to basic 7, 8 and 9; offer counselling services in and out of campus,” as well as increasing of capitation grants schools.
Miss Haruna expressed optimism that with the support of the various stakeholders and key decision makers, the implementation of the recommendations would help to ameliorate the unpalatable phenomenon of teenage pregnancies and school dropouts in the Wa Municipality.
She explained the data validation workshop was the second phase of the three-phased YoB project where it carried out the research to collate data to support its cause of evidence-based advocacy.
Mr Sumaila Chakurah, the Chief Executive Officer of Noni Hub, speaking at the workshop, said infrastructural development was key to affirming the “back to school” policy and campaign as he noted that the current school infrastructure, from desks to buildings, was inimical to the policy objective.
He questioned if a heavily pregnant school pupil could comfortably sit on any of the dual desks that were common in our schools, and if a pupilmother was able to be accommodated in the classroom together with the baby.
He urged for the establishment of nursery facilities in the schools where pupil mothers could leave their babies safely rather than having to worry about where to leave the baby or how to afford fees to enrol the baby at a private nursery facility.
Mr Chakurah said there was a need to address the root causes of teenage pregnancy in order to decisively do away with the menace.
He observed that teenage pregnancies occurred largely due to parental irresponsibility owing to poverty and thus, called for the designing of economic empowerment interventions for parents so as to adequately care for their teenage wards.
Naa Sidik Osman who represented the Waala Traditional Council said issues raised by the YoB were genuine and called for stricter punishments for perpetrators who put teenage girls in the family way.
He said the chief and people of his community, Dobile, a suburb of Wa, had imposed conventions on girls who stay out late in the name of food vending to curb the menace in the community when he was asked what traditional authorities were doing to curb the menace.