Out of Ghana’s 16 regions, the North East Region leads in the data for teenage pregnancies. The Upper East Region comes in second place to the North East Region. Although there has been a little drop in the Upper East Region’s adolescent pregnancy prevalence, stakeholders maintain that more work has to be done to keep the region’s performance well below the national average.
The Upper East Regional Focal Person in charge of Adolescent Reproductive Health at the Regional Health Directorate, Madam Dora Kulariba shared these concerns when she spoke to Mark Smith on A1 Radio’s Day Break Upper East Show.
“As of now, the Upper East Region is the second [region] leading with teenage pregnancies. We were, however, expecting that at least, we should go down a bit but we are still second. The North East Region is first,” she said.
Madam Kulariba was worried that the many efforts of stakeholders had not improved the situation much.
“We are doing a lot, but it is like it is not coming up. But there is light at the end of the tunnel. What I use to compensate myself as a service provider is that, if we hadn’t put things in place, it would have been worse,” she said.
Meanwhile, over the last three years, the Upper East Region has been recording an overall decrease in teenage pregnancy cases.
“We have made some gains even though we are still far from the national target which is 11.5 percent per region,” a Regional Information Officer with the Ghana Health Service, Madam Charity Tanni said when she spoke on A1 Radio’s Day Break Upper East Show recently.
Madam Tanni explained that the reduction in the overall cases of teenage pregnancies could be attributed to concerted efforts from stakeholders.
“Looking at data from the past 3 years, we have actually recorded a decline from 15.4 percent to 15.2 percent in 2021. In 2022, we had 14.2 percent. We would say we have recorded some gains because of the work we have done,” she said.
Source: A1radioonline.com|101.1MHz|Mark Kwasi Ahumah Smith|Ghana
