Swedru (C/R) Nov. 01, GNA – Obaapa Foundation, a non-governmental organisation in partnership with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), have organised a workshop for chiefs and queen mothers of Agona Nyakrom, in the Agona West Municipal District, Central Region, to end child marriage. The two-day workshop sought to empower the traditional leaders to create conducive environments for adolescent girls to develop, by enhancing their knowledge of Gender-Based Violence (GBV), gender-sensitive adolescent sexual reproductive health rights and family planning. Experts took the traditional leaders through topics like; the effects of child marriage and related issues, including Sexual and Gender-Based Violence (SGBV), health complications, legal provisions and existing sanctions for offenders.
Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP) Mercy Brown, the Director of Stores at the Police Headquarters emphasised the need to educate traditional leaders on the implications of teenage pregnancy, early marriage and child abuse, amid the growing number of early child deaths. She said child marriages posed great danger to the nation and if stakeholders acted indifferently, it might come back to haunt them, stressing that “it is wrong for parents to throw their pregnant girls out to stay with the men responsible for their pregnancies,” maintaining that such acts fuelled child marriage.
ACP Brown noted that the transition period of the girl-child from adolescence to womanhood remained the most difficult time because they become more susceptible to influences, and being confronted with gender inequality and poverty, this transition often exposed girls to higher chances of becoming school dropouts, child marriage, Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs), adolescent pregnancy, and SGBV among others. She urged Chiefs and Queen mothers to reach out to the police or courts, in the redress of complex issues of early and child marriages among other related cases in their communities, for effective support.
ACP Brown explained the rules and regulations regarding child marriages and related issues, saying, such offences and their punitive measures were clearly spelt out in Ghana’s 1992 Constitution, and encouraged the participants and all stakeholders to be bold in taking immediate steps towards fighting against such anomalies within their communities. She said the chiefs and queen mothers could also state the customary laws that prevented child marriages and present them to the Presidency to be added to the national laws. Mrs Dorcas Sam Mensah, a Public Health Nurse at the Agona West Municipal Health Directorate, highlighted some of the complications young girls suffer during pregnancy and childbirth, due to their undeveloped bodies.
She said apart from becoming school dropouts, they faced various health threats including malnutrition, anaemia, STIs, premature childbirth, low birth weight, and fistula, leading to entrenched poverty and diseases or even death. She said reducing child marriage would help millions of girls, women and their children to live healthy lives. The Chiefs and Queen mothers expressed their gratitude to the programme organisers for the initiative to help girls abstain from early and child marriages and gave their assurance to implement all the knowledge they had acquired in their respective localities, to help promote gender equality.
The workshop climaxed with a durbar at the Agona Nyakrom palace forecourt, to end the series of community engagements, allowing for the Agona Nyakrom Paramountcy of the Agona West District, to make a declaration of their commitment to end child marriage under the “Ending Child Marriage One Paramountcy at a Time” initiative.
By Stanley Senya
Source: GNA