Over 600 girls in the Essumeja traditional area of the Amansie East Municipality of Ashanti are being supported with free sanitary pads and reproductive health education.

The initiative of the wife of the paramount chief of Essumeja Asantemanso seeks to address absenteeism among adolescent girls who skip classes due to menstruation.

Education authorities are worried many adolescent girls stay away from school due to poor management of menstruation.

Girls in their puberty age resort to the use of clothes and other unhygienic means. They lack the funds to buy sanitary wares.

Many of these girls, mostly seeing their menses for the first time, choose to stay away from the classroom.

James Kwame Amoah is the headteacher of Essumena R/C JHS. His school is among those with the highest number of girls absenting from class because of menstruation.

“Most of our female students find it a challenge to buy sanitary pad so it has really become rampant in the sense that during contact hours, their colleagues may be in the classroom whilst for some circumstances, the ladies have to go to the changing rooms,”he said.

The Oheneyere Reproductive Health Support Foundation is attending to the needs of girls in the area.

The Foundation, an initiative of the wife of the paramount chief of Essumeja, is not only distributing sanitary pads but also supporting schools in the traditional area with reproductive health education.

With the help of Marie Stopes, the foundation is embarking on a sensitization programme to educate girls on their reproductive health.

At one such programmes that coincided with the Akwasidae Festival celebration of the Essumenjahene, Nana Okyere Kusi Ntrama, over 100 students received support.

The foundation also organized breast screening exercise for women in the community.

Founder of the Foundation, Doreen Ntrama expressed concern about the impact of period poverty on girls' education in the area.

“It’s very much impacting on their education. Most of the girls would not come to school because they don’t have the support. They do not have the materials to keep themselves clean to stay in school. Our main purpose is to try and support the girls”Mrs Ntrama added.