Forced and child marriage has been a practice in some communities in the norther zone of Ghana. Duu, a town in the West Mamprusi municipality of the north east region is not an exception. The practice has brought untold hardship to teenage mothers and victims of child and forced marriages.
Some of the victims mostly young girls aged between 13 – 17 years and yet to write their Basic Certificate Examination are seeking for help to return to school while others want to go into vocational training or learn a trade.
According to the West Mamprusi Municipal Social Welfare Directorate, hundreds of teenage girls in the community have dropped out of school after they are either married off or became pregnant at young age. Most of such children suffer depression at such early stage in life.
With no alternative source of livelihood other than farming, the victims are calling for both material and financial support to pursue academic careers or pay apprenticeships fee,
They spoke with Rescue Volunteers Correspondent Eliasu Tanko and appealed for support to eradicate teenage pregnancy and child marriage victims.
Rescue Volunteers Ghana over the years have been receiving migrants from the northern zone of Ghana who are stranded in the Capital city in search of life’s basic needs; cloth shelter and food. Most of the female migrants that visits Rescue Volunteers for help happen to be victims of child marriage. Some of these runaway girls find it difficult to go back home when the option is proposed, with fear of being captured or their own family returning them to their ‘husbands’. They rather prefer to face hardship in the cities than go back.
In order to help curb the problem, Rescue Volunteers decided to attack it from the root by getting other NGOs with similar objective on board to run programs in the northern zone where most of the migrants hail from. Programs and projects have been planned for the comings year. For that matter, the launch in Duu becomes necessary to draw attention of Ghanaians to the challenge and also introduce our joint program to fight Child marriage which is dubbed Anti-Child Marriage program.
