Society asked to pay attention to adolescent reproductive health issues

Isaac Nyampong, Programmes Officer, Alliance for Reproductive Health Rights (ARHR) has underscored the need for society to champion the reproductive health of adolescents, especially girls.

He said, “the health of adolescents is crucial to our development", therefore, the country needed to focus on their health needs for a better future and sustainable development.

Mr Nyampong said adolescents could only become a healthy youthful workforce to accelerate the socio-economic development of the country if they had holistic development including good health care and education.

He was speaking at a capacity building workshop aimed at facilitating the effective and collaborative implementation of an adolescent girls’ empowerment project in Kumasi in the Ashanti Region.

It is being attended by community-based organizations, health workers, media and other non-state actors drawn from the project implementing communities.

The five-year project, which started in 2018, is being funded by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the Canadian government.

It is being implemented in five regions of the country under the theme: “Empowering Adolescent Girls through improved access to reproductive health information and services and quality gender-responsive services”.

The beneficiary districts are; Komenda-Edina-Eguafo-Abirem district in the central, Bosome-Freho district in Ashanti, South Dayi in Volta, Nzema East in Western and Ashiedu-Keteke sub-district in the Greater Accra region.

Mr Nyampong called on parents to endeavour to abreast themselves of adolescent reproductive health rights so they could be able to provide their adolescent girls with the right information regarding those rights.

Mr. Nii Ankonu Annorbah-Sarpei, Director of Programmes at ARHR said the project aimed at improving the lives of out of school adolescent girls in the community and mitigating cases such as teenage pregnancy, sexual abuse, HIV and AIDs and called for support from community leaders.

He said though the government had developed a strategy for promoting adolescents health, funding had been inadequate so the project was also aimed at complementing government's efforts attacking the challenges facing adolescent girls.

Mr Annorbah-Sarpei said to ensure that the project achieved its desired objective, some adolescents health champions had been trained in the various beneficiary districts on issues regarding their reproductive health rights so they could reach out to their peers with the information.

“The approach we have adopted is tailored at addressing the needs of adolescent girls while we appreciate that boys are key players in the sector, we feel that it is time to empower women, especially adolescent girls who, for some reasons are not able to go to school," he added.

He urged the media to continue to highlight issues affecting adolescent girls in society for them to be addressed.