BECE Girls Give Birth In Exams

TWO STUDENTS sitting for their final exams in this year’s Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) last week gave birth to a baby boy and girl at different centres in two different districts that share a common boundary.

The young girls, both 16 years old, were writing the exams at Atwereboana D/A Junior High School (JHS) centre in the Adansi South District in the Ashanti Region, and Odumto M/A JHS centre in the Assin North Municipality in the Central Region respectively when they gave birth to a boy and girl, before continuing their papers later.

The girl at the Atwereboana centre, who was among 1,789 candidates, went into labour during the second day of her science paper-B exam on Tuesday, while her counterpart from the Assin North area gave birth only a few minutes into the commencement of the exam on Thursday.

DAILY GUIDE gathered that the teenager at the Adansi South District had just started on the 2-hour portion of the test at the examination centre when she started experiencing labour pains.

Her centre was among the six centres that had 1,069 male students and 720 female students drawn from 44 schools across the district sitting for the final exams.

Among the 720 female students were six teenage nursing mothers and 22 pregnant girls who wrote the exams.

In the case of the Assin North Municipality, Vida Odum, the Municipal Director of Education, said the new nursing mother was among 2,478 students in nine centres she had visited.

According to her, 24 of the female students had gotten pregnant prior to the start of the exams, with only five of them managing to sit for the exams.

She disclosed that the new-born baby had been christened ‘Yaa BECE’ since she was delivered at the time her mother was writing the exams.

Ms Odum, who went round to familiarize herself with the situation on the ground, called for collaboration to deal with the menace of teenage pregnancy in the area.

The District Chief Executive (DCE) for Adansi South, Benjamin Anhwere, on his part said he would team up with the District Education Director to design educational programmes to nip such incidents in the bud in the near future.