100 girls drop out of school in Wa West District

"I'll wish to bring to the notice of this House that the rate at which our girls are leaving school or the classroom is alarming. On record, last year alone, 2022/2023 academic year, about 100 students left school out of 242 communities in the district," the Wa West District Girl's Education officer, Madam Hawa Daari, has said.

"You can imagine that we want to collate from 4:100 and 242:X. What do we expect? This results was gathered from a survey carried out by one NGO, CDA-Ghana, Community Development Alliance - Ghana. This is an NGO that also has the interest of girls in Wa West going back to school whether they have given birth or not. This information was gathered some where in October last year, 2022," she added.

She made the disclosure when she presented a paper before the second sitting of the first session of the first District Youth Parliament at Wechiau.

She noted that such girls left school from various stages ranging from Primary 2 to JHS 3, adding that, the number of those married off is equally high.



The Wa West District in the Upper West Region is currently battling with rising cases of school dropouts among teenage girls as more of the school going age often get pregnant with others being married off.



This, according to stakeholders in the area, is alarming, and urgent steps need to be taken to tackle the situation head-on.



Madam Hawa lamented that during the last BECE, about 15 teenagers sat in the examinations while pregnant, with two others carrying their babies whilst writing their papers.

According to her, despite all the effort put in place by the government, NGOs, and all stakeholders to get these girls back to school, the efforts are still yielding minimal results.

Mr Amankona Ampofo, the Upper West Regional Director of the National Youth Authority (NYA), said the region is bedevilled with severe poverty, intra and inter violence, among others, are what continue to contribute to the crises.

Madam Vida Diorotey, the District Chief Executive (DCE) for Wa West, while lamenting on the figures called for the segregation of data to differentiate the number of teenage mothers who got married off early but are not students from those that have dropped out of school due to pregnancy.

She expressed fear that failure to do so by health workers when recording the data would likely always portray the district as one with the highest number of school dropouts due to teenage pregnancies when that maybe different from the reality.

The DCE called on all stakeholders to bring their hands on deck in the sensitization drive on the importance of girl child education, as no one stakeholder alone can win the fight against the canker.