Dr. Leticia Adelaide Appiah, NPC Executive Director
The Executive Director of the National Population Council, Dr. Leticia Adelaide Appiah, has bemoaned the increasing rate at which teenagers, including girls in elementary schools, get pregnant annually in the country.
Addressing the media during a Reproductive Health Education (RHE) Policy Review meeting in Accra, she explained that per the 2021 Population and Housing Census (PHC), Ghana has a youthful population with 73.4 per cent below the age of 35 years.
Dr. Adelaide Appiah said according to the Ghana Health Service, Ghana records over 100,000 teenage pregnancies annually contributing significantly to maternal and child mortality and morbidities.
Implications
The NPC Executive Director stressed that the implications of these data to the country’s health, education, employment, social lives, national security, and sustainable development are so dire that they must elicit individual, community, and national attention.
“We must strive to arrive at a consensus where each stakeholder plays its part to achieve our common goal of healthy population from childhood through adulthood for sustainable development,” she noted.
She emphasised the need to understand the values of resilience, communication, decision making, team building and bridging the inequality gap in all its forms and shapes.
She said it is evident that some of these girls could not write the 2021 West African Senior Secondary Certificate Examination (WASSCE) and the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) because they were pregnant.
She disclosed that most teenage girls drop out of school as a result of a number of factors, including teenage pregnancy and child marriage, adding that there is also a high prevalence of HIV among young people 15-24 years.
“We have always said that our youthfulness is an opportunity, yes indeed it is, however, these important competences make the difference between opportunity and performance that promotes sustainable development. This cannot be achieved without the media, the medium through which we communicate,” she stressed
Education
She noted that building resilient individuals and nations include applying evidence-based information sharing strategies, education and service provision, which are age appropriate and culturally-sensitive in all sectors, including reproductive health of citizens.
Effective communication, she insisted, is arguably one of the most crucial elements to improve all facets of life, explaining that communication is important in strengthening individual and shared resilience.
“For example, comprehensive knowledge about aids for prevention of HIV is low among adolescent girls and boys. Only 18.1% of girls and 24.5% of boys had comprehensive knowledge about AIDS prevention. Ignorance, misinformation, disinformation and lack of services are thus our common worst enemies which we must confront individually and as a community if we are to move from opportunity to performance and results,” she added.
In her opinion, the current trend frustrates efforts in translating the youthful opportunity into performance or desired human capital to promote sustainable development.
To address the situation, she recommended, as a matter of civic duty, healthy relations between leadership and citizens, particularly youth, in showing mutual trust and transparent dialoguing to keep the trusted producers of content and media personnel on the same page in enhancing youth empowerment for national development.
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