EDITORIAL (Daily Searchlight, 19th November, 2021)
Reports from the Wenchi Municipal Education Directorate in the Bono region reveals that among the teenagers participating in this year’s Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE), 14 of them are pregnant while 11 are nursing mothers out of the 2,058 registered candidates.
Wenchi Municipal Director of Education, Mrs. Mary Nyarko Adu Twum revealed this in an interview with Wenchi-based Radio West Africa after her successful tour to all the centres in the municipality on Tuesday, November 16, 2021.
According to Mrs Nyarko, the nursing mothers have caretakers at the examination centers taking care of the babies while their mothers are in the exams hall writing.
The Daily Searchlight commends the authorities of the West African Examination Committee (WAEC) and the Ghana Education Service (GES) for allowing the young women to participate in the examination.
In times past, young women who found themselves in this situation were virtually criminalized, with the result that some of them were forced off the educational calendar.
We believe that the current approach of assisting and allowing them to write the examination is more humane and progressive, and we believe that even more assistance should be offered people who find themselves in this situation.
That said, we would advise young women to be more careful at adolescence, to avoid putting themselves in early motherhood, which is not easy by any circumstance.
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