Teenage pregnancy, a threat to girls’ Education and Empowerment

 GNA – Yaawa Jonas, a 17 year old teenage mother and a school dropout, has attempted suicide severally but has been thinking of who will take care of her 18 month old daughter, the reason for dropping out of school at the second year of the Junior High School.

The thought of not being able to pursue her education to become a nurse, a career she has cherished since her childhood and watching the young man who impregnated her pursue his education, breaks her heart and sometimes she is tempted to take away her life to end it all.

Yaawa’s parents are labourers to a cocoa farmer in a small farming community near Atiwa in the Atiwa West District of the Eastern Region and she is the third of a family of eight. Like many other girls in rural communities, she has to do some form of work to generate income to support her schooling and other personal needs.

She, therefore, undertakes several menial jobs such as labouring, carting cocoa beans from farms and at an oil palm production centre to get something to cater for her needs especially during her monthly cycle.

Yaawa’s mother, a victim of the same circumstance looked up to her to become a nurse and an example for her younger siblings and did everything within her means to support her especially when her father thought the place of a girl, like Yaawa is the kitchen and should stop schooling and get married.

Four months after her delivery, her beloved mother who helped her through the period of pregnancy and had made arrangements to take care of the baby to enable her go back to school painfully died.

Now, Yaawa has no one to take care of her baby for her to return to school and she cannot walk the three kilometres each day with the baby to school and back. The burden of caring for her baby and the shattered dream is just unimaginable for poor Yaawa.

Sharing her story with the GNA, under the “Mobilizing the Media for Fighting COVID-19″ project being implemented by the Journalists for Human Rights in collaboration with the Ghana Journalists Association (GJA)”, Yaawa could not hold back her tears.

At age 17 when she was supposed to be in school, she is a mother already with no source of sustainable livelihood whiles the future looks bleak for her as well as her daughter.

Yaawa is one of the thousands of girls across the country whose future looks bleak because their education has been truncated by teenage pregnancies due to several factors.

These unfortunate girls are not likely to enjoy the Free Senior High School policy introduced by the government as well as the Free Compulsory Universal Basic Education (FCUBE) to ensure that they are empowered through education to grow to become self-reliant women who would make meaningful contributions to their societies in future.

Apart from losing the opportunity to go to school, they also risk being victims of child marriages and all the negatives it come along with as many parents of these unfortunate teenage mother’s find it more convenient to allow their girl children who gets pregnant to marry and settle to begin a family, rather than to take the child and allow them to continue their education.

The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) notes that United Nations Convention on the Rights of Children (CRC) provides signatory government’s and societies in general with the basic elements for the protection of girls and boys up to the time they reach adulthood, any departure from this goals and principles constitutes violation of the rights child, and governments, as duty bearers are accountable to respond to this violations.

However, there are plenty of evidence that in these countries and societies where the right of the child are honoured and respected, girls and boys grow up and develop to their potential and become empowered adults who can function accordingly, unfortunatley there is also evidence of the opposite tendency, devastating consequences especially for girls” says the UNFPA.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), approximately 12 million girls aged 15-19 years and at least 777,000 girls under 15 years give birth each year in developing regions and complications during pregnancy and child birth are the leading causes of death for 15-19-year-old girls globally.

Health experts explain that that adolescent mother’s (ages 10-19 years) are at higher risks of eclampsia, puerperal endometritis and systemic infections than women aged 20-24 years and babies of adolescent mother’s face higher risks of low birth weight, preterm delivery and severe neonatal conditions.

According to the District Health Information Management System (DHIMS) of the Ghana Health Service (GHS), a total of 109,888 teenage pregnancies were recorded in 2020 with the Ashanti Region topping the national league table with 17,802 cases followed keenly by the Eastern Region with 10,865 and Central region with 10,301 cases in that order.

A Ghana Health Service report indicates that between 2014 and 2016, the Eastern region, which occupies the unenviable position as the second with high rate of teenage pregnancy cases recorded a total of 25,285 teenage pregnancies, 669 out of this were aged between 10 and 14 years, whiles in the first quarter of 2016, about 3,000 cases had been recorded already.

What these figures mean is that, over 100,000 teenage girls in Ghana including those in the Eastern Region lose the opportunity to take advantage of the Free Compulsory Universal Basic Education and free Senior High School policy, an effort by the government to promote education to the higher levels particularly among girls as a tool to bridge the gender disparity.

Just like Yaawa, if nothing is done about this, women’s representation at decision making levels will continue to suffer.

Education is considered as a milestone of women empowerment because it enables them to respond to the challenges of society and culture to confront their traditional roles and gender stereotypes to better their lives and their families.

Mrs Joyce Larnyoh, Country Director of International Child Development Program (ICDP), a non-for profit organisation focusing on girl child education and women empowerment in Eastern Region described the situation as scary and called for concerted effort to deal decisively with the root cause of the problem.

She blames irresponsible parenting as the major contributing factor and called on the Municipal and District Assemblies (MDCEs) to implement the by-laws which sought to protect children from acts and practices inimical to their education as well as make parents more responsive to the needs of their children’s upbringing and education for a better society.

In her view, the role of parents and guardians are critical to any strategy and containment measures to remedy the situation, stressing that, parents have a responsibility towards the needs of their children, as a stakeholder in the collective effort to leverage on education to improve the status of girls and women for national development.

She also called for intensification of the awareness on reproductive health and sexuality in schools to uncover the issues around sex and pregnancy as well as reactivation of the social welfare systems and structures to ensure that, “the men who impregnated this girls are held accountable and contribute to the care of the teenage mothers and their babies”.

Mrs Larnyoh mentioned that teenage pregnancies had a multiple effect on the socio-economic development in that most of the girls after getting pregnant are either married off or made to co-habit with the father of their children, which further deepen the vulnerabilities of these girls as well as increase poverty and underprivileged lives.

Unfortunately, the issue of teenage pregnancy seems not to be a matter of priority for the various Municipal and District Assemblies (MDAs). As their prime focus is on infrastructure development, the gravity of teenage pregnancies on socio-economic development calls for the significant involvement of the MDAs, which are mandated with local and community development.

She said the socio-economic implications of the phenomenon was very huge since it entrenched the factors for poverty among generations and called for a national conversation on what penalties should be imposed on parents and guardians who fail in their roles.

The Government of Ghana through the Ghana Education Service (GES) realising the threat of teenage pregnancy on national development, has instituted the re-entry policy for girls who drop out of school due to teenage pregnancy or child birth as a measure to tackle all gender-based and pregnancy related issues, which confront girls’ education.

However, Madam Patricia Bravo, Eastern Regional Girl-child Education Coordinator of the Ghana Education Service indicate that most of girls who drop out of school due to pregnancies do not return to school after childbirth inspite of the re-entry policy due to several factors.

She mentioned that stigmatization and parents failure to take care of the babies as the key impediments in the re-entry programme, adding that, it was impossible for the teenage mother’s to send their babies to school and so parents support was key in realising the goals of the policy.

Again, she said fear of being stigmatized was also preventing most of the girls from going back to school even when their parents were ready to take care of their babies, the policy according to her gives the allowance for such girls to change schools yet some still find it difficult to go back.

Government in recognition of the huge threat teenage pregnacies posed to national development has introduced the re-entry policy, but there are indications that it is not that easy to go to school after giving birth as a teenager, everything therefore must be done to prevent teenage pregnancies.

GNA

………………………………………………………………