Sex education requires effective academic curricular – NGO advocates

Mr David Ayine , the Acting Executive Director of Youth Harvest Foundation, an NGO in Bolgatanga, Upper East Region, has called for sex education to be taught through an effective curricular.

This will enable the teachers and development agents to help fight the increasing rate of teenage pregnancies in the country.

He said there were already signs of a degenerating youth with a bleak future in the region and that needed urgent attention.

“The alarming rise in teenage pregnancies and sexual promiscuity in schools, at home and communities are alarming and stakeholders need to take holistic measures to stop it.”

Mr Ayine made the appeal in an interview with the Ghana News Agency in Bolgatanga.

He said physical education lessons in schools were neither health lessons nor lessons on sexuality for adolescents.

He said evidence based approach that exposed adolescents to the reality was key and referred to research on the impact of COVID-19 on students that was conducted in some districts in the region and showed results of high figures of teenage pregnancies in the Kassena-Nankana, Talensi and the Bawku West Districts.

The results were also confirmed by the Ghana Health Service survey, he added.

The Executive Director said Health education was YHF’s major thematic area, aligned to addressing child marriage, gender and teenage pregnancies and it was implementing it in-schools to educate adolescents on consequences of having irresponsible sex behavior.

It is also undertaking out of school interventions through sexual health education programmes, he said.

He called for appropriate manuals for teachers for school health and sex education.