By Gloria Edinam Atiase
Adolescents make up one point two billion of the world’s population, with more than two-thirds living in low- or middle-income countries. These numbers are expected to grow over the next 35 years. According to the 2020 Population estimates, half of Ghana’s population representing 49 percent was under age 20 and up to 22 percent were adolescents aged 10 to 19.
These adolescents require improved health and care services, guided by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, SDGs, by 2030. With such a growing adolescent population in Ghana, this need becomes even more urgent.
It is for this reasons that a consortium led by the Right to Play, an NGO, with WaterAid, the Forum for Women Educationists, FAWE, and FHI 360 as key partners, embarked on the Sexual Health and Reproductive Education, SHARE project, a five-year initiative funded by Global Affairs Canada, GAC, aimed at improving access to sexual and reproductive health education and services for young people.
The project is being implemented in four districts in the Upper East Region namely Kasenna-Nankana Municipal, Kassena-Nankana West District, Bongo District and Builsa District.
The project is committed to promote gender equality and empower women and girls as fundamental to eradicating poverty and foster a more peaceful, inclusive and prosperous society. It seeks to enhance the enjoyment of health – rated human rights through a multi -faceted approach including essential improvements in Water, Sanitation and Hygiene, WASH, services.
With barely a year to the end of the project, an engagement meeting was held for stakeholders in Koforidua the Eastern Regional capital, to review the major successes, lessons learned and valuable outputs from SHARE project implementation and how to integrate them into national policy planning, public health initiatives evaluation and assessment for adolescents and young people as part of a sustainability framework.
The Ag. Director of Family Health at the Ghana Health Service, Dr Kennedy Brightson, said the health sector has a mandate to promote the health and development of young people by providing quality adolescent healthcare through integrated services and programmes in health facilities, and outreach sites including mobile services. This involves ensuring that adolescent population have access to accurate information about the services available to them.
“It is important we recognize that adolescents should not be denied access to their reproductive health services or other health – promoting interventions for any unjust reasons, including those rooted in economic or social factors”, he indicated.
Dr Brightson said that in delivering responsive adolescent reproductive health services a key factor is a trained workforce that is adequately distributed across all sites, including rural, peri-urban, and underserved areas. He urged participants to reflect on and review the successes, lessons learned, recommendations and products to be shared in light of the globally evaluated key principles for adolescent and youth sexual and reproductive health services.
The Head of Programmes at WaterAid Ghana, Mr Mohammed Ibrahim Adokor, said adolescent sexual and reproductive health as a development issue is mostly neglected by governments therefore the need for NGOs to take up the issue for total development of countries.
He said his outfit helped construct WASH facilities in the four implementation districts, trained healthcare providers and educated on menstrual hygiene and management trainings.
The Interim Country Director for Right to Play, Mr Evans Sinkari, in an interview with GBC News said they have been working towards supporting the Ghana Health Service with the right structure, skill, and set-up to enable nurses and community health workers have the right attitude to support adolescents as they seek for information and services.
He noted that they also work around the area of advocacy to find the challenging issues and the need of the adolescent in rural areas which will inform policy review, inform new policy design, implementation and general practices.
Mr Sinkari was of the view that there is stigmatization that is why the project look at the area of sensitization and conscientisation around the community level and even among the adolescents themselves.
“To some extent, we also promoted adolescent friendly environment on some health facilities and is integrated into the health system to deal with the issue of stigmatization. If it is separated, then they see you going to this corner, the whole community know that people go there for condom, they will say Adjoa has gone for condom looking at where she is coming from. But if it is a clinic and you go there , as part of consultations or whatever , nobody will single it out “.
The participants were made up of education, health, social welfare, gender and human rights and policy and advocacy development experts.
