Miss TOSOGHA to embark on teenage pregnancy campaign
The 14-year-old 2016 beauty queen of the Tourism Society of Ghana (TOSOGHA), Miss Esther Honu is to embark on a national campaign against teenage pregnancy.
Teenage pregnancy, which sometimes claims the lives of adolescents, has become a national problem because when children give birth to children it comes along with great cost not only to parents or guardians but the society at large.
An estimated number of 750,000 teenagers between 15 and 19 years become pregnant in Ghana annually.
Miss Esther Honu, a Form Two pupil of the E.P Junior High School at Ashaiman, was crowned ‘Miss TOSOGHA 2016’ in Accra after emerging the winner of a Beauty with Brains Contest which saw more than 1,000 young girls competing.
As Miss TOSOGHA 2016, Miss Honu, in an interview with the Junior Graphic, said the campaign would first start next month in the Volta Region where she hails from and which has recorded the highest number of cases of teenage pregnancy.
With basic schools in both rural and urban communities as targets for her campaign, Miss Honu said her role would be to inspire young girls to avoid adolescent pregnancy and also encourage them to put more premium on their education by studying to achieve their goals.
The campaign against teenage pregnancy, she said, must be intensified because “it is a worrying situation since most of the girls are not able to go back to school and also face major reproductive health problems later in life.”
‘We, young girls must be supported to speak against this social canker and I believe my campaign will achieve its aim of getting our girls to practise abstinence till they are married.”
Apart from the campaign, Ms Honu said she would assist to distribute library books and ICT equipment to schools that lack such materials to promote effective teaching and learning.
The beauty queen called on corporate institutions, organisations, non-governmental organisations and individuals to support her campaign to reduce teenage pregnancy in the country.