The Wa East District has recorded a total of 104 cases of teenage pregnancy in the first quarter of 2023, Dr. Pascal Kingsley Mwin, the Wa East District Director of Health Services, has revealed.
He said the situation was a source of worry because the cases were alarming despite the health education and other interventions put in place by the stakeholders in the district to curb the menace.
Dr. Mwin revealed this in Wa in a situation paper presented to the Upper West Regional Youth Parliament on the status of “Health Services Delivery in Wa East District; the Challenges and the Way Forward.”
He said many of the teenage pregnancy cases recorded in the district within the period were from child marriages, while others were attributed to poverty.
“To curb this we have established adolescent health clubs and corners to provide adolescent health services and also educate them.
“We have engaged communities through durbars but we think that by-laws in communities where it is in on ascendency are urgently needed,” he said.
Meanwhile, research conducted by the Upper West Regional Youth Parliament in the Wa East District in 2022 revealed that 83 per cent of girls who participated in the study had sex with men for money to buy their basic needs including sanitary pads.
It was, however, trite knowledge that such sexual relationships of school girls not only expose them to Sexual Transmitted Infections but could also lead to teenage pregnancy and its associated early or child marriages.
That had been a cause of school dropout among girls in the Upper West Region and an impediment to the realisation of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals on education, health, and poverty eradication among others.
