Chief Executive Officer (CEO) for the National Youth Authority (NYA), Pius Enam Hadzide is concerned about the increasing rate of teenage pregnancies in Ghana.
He disclosed the country in the last five years has recorded about 500,000 teen pregnancies.
Sourcing his statistics from the Ghana Health Service, he cried out, “One can just imagine the total cases if patients who don’t seek medical care from the hospitals are added.”
“It is surprising how these young ladies get pregnant knowing well it is not easy to cater for a child when you have little,” he told Sefah-Danquah who sat in for Samuel Eshun on the Happy Morning Show (#HappyHMS) aired on e.TV Ghana and Happy 98.9FM.
Pius Hadzide said the National Youth Authority is responsible for setting up centers and educating the youth on the consequences and dangers involved in having a child or aborting pregnancies. “We sit at the top with a bird’s view of the problem at hand, and we keep having discussions with the people who find interest in the issue and try to device means on curbing it.”
“The NYA is indeed grateful to President Nana Addo for introducing the free SHS system. This has helped in the education of reproductive health amongst the youth as we now have a lot of the youthful population in school than before.”
The NYA in contributing to the awareness of teenage pregnancy is also setting up resource centers across the country to also educate teenagers at home. “It is quite difficult to communicate with the youth at home but because the ratio to those in school is more, we can at least educate more of them to solve this problem. We are building youth resource centers across all the regions which are at various stages of completion to engage the youth across the nation on teenage pregnancy.”
By: Louisa Antiede Tetteh
