The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has enrolled six adolescent girls at Techiman in the Bono East Region in a non-formal training programme to acquire employable skills in support of better livelihoods.

The beneficiaries are all minors, aged between 15 and 17, who were single teenage mothers or victims of child marriage.

They were trained in dressmaking and hairdressing to create jobs and wealth for themselves and their families for a secure socio-economic future.

This is to empower adolescent mothers and survivors of child marriage to make a living, address the menace of child marriage and sexual and gender-based violence, and improve reproductive health outcomes. 

This is being implemented in six selected areas in the region; Techiman South and Nkoranza South municipalities, Techiman North, Nkoranza North, Pru East and West districts with the support of the Bono East Regional Coordinating Council.

The initiative broadly sought to reduce the prevalence of child marriage and improve the health, safety, and general well-being of young girls and women.

Ms Julian Harrison Mutaah, the UNFPA Regional Focal Person at the RCC, said this during a monitoring exercise in Techiman and other project communities by a team of UNFPA officials to assess and evaluate the progress of implementation, achievements, challenges and lessons learnt. 

She said the master apprentices had been provided with tools/equipment to facilitate their work to break the cycle of poverty, adolescent motherhood, and child marriage. 

Highlighting some achievements since January, this year, Ms Mutaah said a group of trained Muslim men, known as ‘Male Champions’ had formed a club at Kintampo in the Kintampo North Municipality of the region to engage in house-to-house discussions and hold ‘parliamentary sittings’ to educate their peers about the threat of child marriage and gender-based violence. 

She shared a testimony of a female beneficiary who, through the knowledge gained, was able to convince her uncle to stop giving out his teenage daughter for marriage, adding that another young man confessed he had stopped smoking because of the exposure through the training.