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The Brong-Ahafo Region ranks third in in-school teenage pregnancy in the country, Ms Mary Gyimah, Sunyani Municipal Director of Education has disclosed in Sunyani.

She said research indicates that “the Region has a lot of issues about adolescent sexual reproductive health” and lamented that, it was militating against the Ghana Education Service’s (GES’s) major objective of quality education for pupils and students to become useful citizens after school.

Ms Gyimah was speaking in an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA) after the opening of a three-day training workshop on Adolescent Sexual Reproductive Health Manual for 63 teachers, comprising 26 males and 37 females from 21 basic schools in the Sunyani Municipality.

They were made up of Guidance and Counseling Coordinators, School Health Education Programme (SHEP) Coordinators and Head teachers.

The workshop was sponsored by the Department of Foreign and International Development (DFID) of the United Kingdom (UK), through Palladium, a UK-based non-governmental organisation (NGO) that is into education and promotion of quality adolescent sexual reproductive health.

It aimed at equipping the participants to lead in the formation of the adolescent school health clubs in the Municipality and also defining their responsibilities to ensure effective organisation and success of the clubs in their respective schools.

Ms Gyimah noted that quality education produced graduates as assets but not liabilities to themselves, communities and country, and to achieve that “school should go through the pupils and students but not they going through the school”, she added.

But a major hindrance in attaining the GES’s goal in the country is teenage pregnancy, hence the implementation of the Ghana Adolescent Reproductive Health (GHARH) Project by the GES in the Brong-Ahafo Region with the support from the DFID, Ms Gyimah said.

She said the GES was very much concerned about the sexual and reproductive health of in-school adolescents because of its consequences on access and regular participation in school and quality education outcomes.

“Programmes that prepare adolescents to be healthy are their right and therefore adolescent reproductive health issues have been integrated across several subjects in the basic and secondary school curriculum”, Ms Gyimah said.