By Stanley Senya
Swedru (C/R), Nov. 04, GNA – Chiefs and Queen mothers in the Agona Swedru area, have been engaged in a sensitisation workshop on the negative effects of child marriage and the importance of ensuring adolescent reproductive health, to help promote gender equality.
The two-day event which is part of the United Nation’s global initiative to end early and child marriages, all forms of Gender-Based Violence (GBV) and related issues, recorded over 40 participants.
It is also an advocacy dialogue platform, offering opportunities to families and communities to advance gender equality and create an enabling environment for adolescents, particularly girls to thrive.
Rev. Aku Xornam Adzraku-Kevi, the Executive Director for Purim African Youth Development Platform (PAYDP) in a presentation, touched on the various forms of Gender-Based Violence (GBV) such as psychological and economic violence, as well as physical and sexual abuses including rape.
On child marriage, she explained that the issue could be attributed to several factors including the presence of poverty on the part of parents leading to poor parental care, disobedience, and pressure on the child, “but these circumstances should not allow us to push our young girls into early marriages because its effects are damaging,” she advised.
She encouraged parents to love their children, to be able to protect them from Sexual and GBV within their communities.
She educated the participants, especially the Queen mothers on ensuring that their young girls abstained from pre-marital sex and teenage pregnancy, adding that these posed a serious barrier to achieving educational goals, and urged them not to conceal, but report any form of sexual abuse they encountered in their communities to the appropriate authorities for action.
The Chiefs and Queen mothers unanimously admitted that the effective implementation of the project, would impact positively on the living conditions of young people, thereby reducing all forms of sexual abuses.
“We will embrace this project and make sure we utilise its effects for the benefit our communities, to help reduce all manner of child sexual abuses,” they said.
The global initiative, being rolled out in phases, is under the support of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), which is the UN’s Sexual and Reproductive Health Agency, whose target is to end child marriage and related issues, by working with and through engagement stakeholder groups to achieve these goals.
GNA