Statistics from the Metropolitan Education Department of Sekondi-Takoradi Metropolis in the Western Region indicate that, for the past five years, out of the 30, 005 candidates who registered for the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE), 131 were absent and did not sit for the examination.
According to the 2016- 2020 report, 16 of the absentees did not write the examination because they were pregnant.
At the Senior High School(SHS), the metropolitan education report (2016-2020), out of 33,041 candidates who were registered, 94 candidates absented and did not sit for the WASSEC.
The coordinator of the Twin-Cities in Sustainable Partnership Project,Isaac Aidoo, revealed these at a stakeholders’ engagementSekondi on Thursday.
He complained that illicit use of drugs, teenage pregnancy, child prostitution and gender-based violence were gradually increasing year by year in the metropolis.
Mr Aidoo, said “The city is grappling with the challenge of child prostitution, teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections/ diseases. Child prostitution and teenage pregnancy are on the ascendency, as transactional sex is used to bait children from poor households; and this has increased the school drop-out rate with the youth without employable skills.”
The situation, he noted, deprived the teenage mothers the opportunity to increase their knowledge base, skills and capacity to work and earn income to escape poverty.
Issues of domestic and gender-based violence do not help citizens to attain their desired standards of living, he added.
Mr Aidoo said, conscious efforts must be made to ensure that the gender gap in planning’ was reduced and that, the concerns and aspirations of women, teenage mothers and children should be integrated into the planning process.
“It is against this background that the Twin-Cities in Sustainable Partnership’ project designed a component to help address these challenges. The Twin-Cities in Sustainable Partnership Project is a 3-year project being implemented in the cities of Sekondi-Takoradi (Ghana) and Palermo (Italy) funded by the European Union (EU).
“It is being implemented under the EU’s “Local Authorities: Partnerships for Sustainable Cities Programme” launched in 2019. The overall objective of the three (3) year project dubbed, ‘Twin-Cities in Sustainable Partnership’ is to promote a Sustainable and Integrated Urban Development in the two cities,” he explained.
The project, MrAidoo said, also would contribute to enhancing urban management by addressing challenges such as urban sprawl, climate change, poverty and exclusion.
He hoped that the engagement would provide a platform for stakeholders to design strategies and interventions to support the victims and also protect and preserve children and the youth for the future.
FROM CLEMENT ADZEI BOYE, SEKONDI
Caption: MrAidoo addressing the meeting
Caption 2: Participants at the meeting
Pix: Absent examination 1 – 2/samba/10/04/2022
