By Anthony Adongo Apubeo
Bongo (U/E), July 19, GNA – Professor Hazel Miseda Numbo, Treasurer, Forum for African Women Educationalists Africa (FAWE-Africa), a gender-focused organisation, says African leaders should work together to proffer home-grown solutions to the challenges confronting the growth and development of girls and young women on the continent.
She said African countries’ continuous overreliance on donor support to undertake certain interventions was not sustainable in addressing the challenges confronting the people.
Prof Numbo, thus, underscored the need to develop local policies that encouraged strong leadership, influence and mentorship from the local level.
“We need to work together so we can find home-grown solutions because home-grown solutions are more lasting than the donor monies…because the West will always give us just enough to keep us going but they will never eradicate our issues,” she said.
Speaking to stakeholders in Bongo and Navrongo in the Upper East Region, Professor Numbo, also the Vice Chancellor of the Great Lakes University of Kisumu, Kenya, encouraged the government to roll out policies that supported local initiatives and local leaders, like the chiefs and queen mothers, to intensify education to eliminate harmful cultural practices against girls and women.
Professor Numbo said this when she led a delegation of FAWE-Africa and FAWE-Ghana to interact with community champions supporting the implementation of the five-year Sexual Health and Reproductive Education (SHARE) project.
It is being implemented by a consortium led by Right to Play and supported by WaterAid Ghana, FHI360 and FAWE-Ghana.
The project, with funding support from Global Affairs Canada, is being implemented in the Kassena-Nankana and Builsa North Municipalities and the Bongo and Kassena-Nankana West Districts.
It aims to advance gender equality by providing access to age-appropriate sexual and reproduction health education and gender-responsive care for young people.
The project sought, in particular, to work with community stakeholders and institutions to fight school dropout, teenage pregnancy, child marriage and abuses as well as break barriers that give rise to harmful cultural practices to empower girls and young women for sustainable development.
Professor Numbo and her team; Madam Teresa Omondi-Adeitan, the Deputy Executive Director of FAWE-Africa, Mr Richard Chelagar, Head of Finance and Administration, FAWE-Africa and Mr Richard Amoani, National Coordinator, FAWE-Ghana, were to get first-hand information on how the project was impacting lives of beneficiary communities.
Professor Numbo noted that it was refreshing that the project was contributing to reducing cases of teenage pregnancy, and child marriage among others in the communities as well as empowering communities to support teenage mothers to return to school.
She said there was a need for the government to adopt the approach and sustain it and encouraged stakeholders to motivate young women and girls to pursue Science, Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) related programmes.
“We have a MasterCard Foundation project coming up in the next year and Ghana has been targeted for that project to make sure that we get our young girls to go to TVET colleges to empower them to live better lives,” she said.
The stakeholders commended FAWE and its partners for the project, which had helped to reduce teenage pregnancy, child marriage, school dropouts and assisting teenage mothers to return to school.
They appealed for sustainability and scaling up of the project to other communities.
Statistics from the Ghana Health Service have revealed that teenage pregnancy cases in the Bongo and Kassena-Nankana West Districts reduced from 16 per cent in 2021 to 11 per cent in 2023.
It also reduced from 19.7 per cent in 2021 to 14.3 per cent in 2023, to which the stakeholders attributed the contribution of the SHARE project.
The delegation later presented equipment to the Tampola Community in the Kassena-Nankana Municipality to support them in the operations of the community information centre as part of the SHARE project.
GNA