Young girls challenged to add value to themselves

Madam Anastasia Kaarawo, the Wa Municipal Education Girl Child Coordinator, has challenged young girls in the Municipality to strive harder to add value to themselves to become useful to society.

The only sure way, she said, is for the girls to add value to themselves through acquiring education, stressing that today’s world was a fast moving one that necessitated people added value to themselves in order to catch up with modern trends.

Madam Anastasia threw the challenge while addressing about 40 Junior High School (JHS) girls from Goripie and Bulenga communities in the Wa East District of the Upper West Region as part of activities marking the International Women’s Day Celebration in Wa by Community Development Alliance (CDA-Ghana).

She described as unfortunate how in the past people relegated Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) to the background and saw it as a course for the academically weak ones.

The Girl Child Coordinator encouraged girls to disabuse their minds of such an erroneous impression and to take advantage of the course to better their lots.

She added that TVET had become so important that the world now shifted its attention towards skills oriented training.

Madam Matilda Chireh, a Programme Officer at the Upper West Regional Office of the Department of Children explained that the International Women’s Day was a day set aside worldwide to celebrate women for the distinguished roles they played towards the advancement of society.

She added that it was also meant to assess how far women had come and to see how they could re-strategise to fashion out exactly what needed to be done to build on their strengths and improve their weaknesses for women to be empowered for a better society.

Madam Chireh commended CDA-Ghana for choosing to celebrate the day with the young girls, saying it would imbibe in them the importance of the event and the need for them to take their education seriously to become responsible citizens and would contribute to the development of their communities and the nation.

She noted that it was the duty of the old to help bring up the young ones to become responsible in society, adding that the involvement of young girls in the celebration of the day was a step in the right direction.

She encouraged the girls to try and know all their rights and endeavour to report anybody who infringed upon such rights to protect their future.

Mr. Frank Adjei, an Official of CDA-Ghana said equal right and opportunity would offer a platform for men to understand that women were not made to handle household chores or take responsibility of home and the family but instead both men and women were responsible for the home.

Earlier, the girls together with the officials marched through the principal streets of Wa holding placards with inscriptions such as “Women are the Nation’s fate”, “Help a woman discover her wings”, “Empowered women; a beautiful nation”, and “Gender equality is a human right, not a female fight” among others.

CDA-Ghana celebrated the day under the local theme “Promoting equal right and opportunity for girls and young women”.