200,000 adolescents benefit from reproductive health services

About 200,000 adolescents in Ashanti and Brong Ahafo Regions are benefitting from adolescent reproductive health services as the fight to reduce teenage pregnancy intensified.

This has come on the back of the three-year Ghana Reproductive Health (GHARH) project.

Dr. Leticia Adelaide Appiah, Executive Director of the National Population Council (NPC), said the adolescent girls and boys had gained increased access to reproductive healthcare services through the establishment of youth corners.

Added to this, she said, was health outreach in the communities and schools to provide the young people with every information they needed to make the right choices.

She was speaking at a ceremony held in Kumasi to mark the official end of the GHARH project, implemented jointly by the NPC, Ghana Education Service (GES), National Youth Authority, Planned Parenthood Association of Ghana (PPAG), Hope for Future Generations, Palladium Group and United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).

She indicated that adolescents, across the world, were faced with social and health-related challenges and said it was important more was done to help them to avoid mistakes.

Dr. Appiah drew attention of the dangers associated with teenage pregnancy – higher risk of death and poverty.

Ghana’s Demographic and Health Survey (GDHS) shows that 10.7 percent of young women and 8.7 percent of their male counterparts between the ages of 15 and 24 have had sex before the age 15.

This, she said, exposed them to pregnancy and its complications as well as sexually transmitted infections and cervical cancer.

It was to help reverse this that the Project, funded by UKAID was launched in January 2014 and covered 27 districts in the two regions – Ashanti and Brong-Ahafo.

The main focus was on improving the provision, knowledge, and awareness of adolescent sexual reproductive health services and strengthening the capacity of the facilities to deliver adolescent-friendly sexual reproductive health services.

Dr. Ebere Anyachukwu of the British Department for International Development (DFID) hailed the project as a huge success.