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EDUCATION

Agona East to fight teenage pregnancy among BECE students

The Agona East District Assembly is strongly determined to provide logistics support to girl-Child unit of Ghana Education Service (GES) to help in the fight against increasing teenage pregnancy cases among BECE students.

Date Created : 6/12/2017 12:00:00 AM : Story Author : GNA

"It is regrettable that last year a total of six teenage pregnancy cases were recorded among BECE students as against 13 this year which showed unpalatable situation for girl-child education growth", it declared.

Mr Dennis Armah-Frempong, District Chief Executive (DCE) for Agona East made this known to the Media after touring BECE centres at the five-day examinations that ended on Friday.

He said the Assembly was poised to ensure that the situation which had reduced the image of girl-child education would be reversed with assistance from other stakeholders in education.

A total of 1,983 candidates registered for this year's BECE made up of 973 boys and 1010 girls.

Three boys were absent during the examination whiles nine girls absented themselves from it with reasons unknown to the education directorate.

One registered candidate was reportedly dead after short illness according to the GES officials, while one girl was also reported to have traveled out of the country.

According to the GES directorate one female candidate was said to have delivered some weeks before the examination started.

The DCE urged the BECE students that the free Senior High School (SHS) policy would be based on academic performance and asked them to study hard to meet the required aggregates.

Mr Armah-Frempong stated that government under President Nana Akufo-Addo was determined to support quality education, adding that programmes would be put in place to ensure that every child of school going age had access to effective teaching and learning.

Mr Samuel Kweku Arhin, Agona East Director of Education said the district was making tremendous attempts to assist girl-child unit of the directorate to form girls clubs and community fora to sensitise parents and guardians to curb the menace.

He said in 2015, the Agona East District had seven schools scoring zero per cent, but through hard work, motivations and other support to teachers and others had reversed the trend.

Mr Arhin said 2016 no basic school in Agona East had zero per cent as compared to the previous year and hoped that in 2017 examinations, no school would score zero per cent.

He called on parents, guardians, Assembly, non-governmental organisations, financial institutions and Central government to come to the aid of the Agona East directorate of GES to perform its mandatory functions.