Ashanti ups effort to fight teen sex and pregnancy

The campaign to bring down teen sex and teen pregnancy has been scaled up in the Ashanti Region with the training of more young people for reproductive health advocacy.

This is being done under the Ghana Adolescent Reproductive Health (GHARH) project, an intervention to improve youth access to health information and quality reproductive health services.

Hope for Future Generations (HFFG), an NGO, the Ghana Health Service (GHS), the Plan Parenthood Association of Ghana (PPAG) and the National Population Council (NPC) are jointly spearheading the activity and the funding is coming from the UKAID-Palladium Group.

Speaking at the closing ceremony of a four-day training workshop for 37 of the peer educators in Kumasi, Mrs. Elsie Ayeh, HFFG Consultant for the GHARH Project, said adolescent sexual and reproductive health required priority attention.

The young people, she said, should be supported and engaged to give them more protection.

She spoke of complications from teen pregnancy, childbirth and unsafe abortion, which often resulted in deaths and said the way forward was to provide them the relevant information and to make sure that they had access to improved health services.

Mrs. Ayeh said the peer advocates were being taught to use the social media for the advocacy.

The trainees were drawn from the Batama and Subin sub-metropolitan areas in Kumasi and the Atwima-Kwanwoma District.

Mrs. Ayeh indicated that the peer educators were vital in dealing with issues affecting adolescents as the young people would be comfortable sharing with them their fears and getting answers to their reproductive health concerns.

She appealed to traditional, religious and community leaders to support them to succeed.

Mr. George Amponsah, the Kumasi Metropolitan Director of the National Youth Authority (NYA), said matters relating to the development of the young people should receive prominent attention.