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Founder of Journalists for Women and Rural Development in Africa, Mrs Shirley Asiedu-Addo, has stressed the need for parents in rural areas to provide their female children the basic necessities particularly sanitary pads.

She said providing the girl child with sanitary pads would help boost her self-confidence because she would feel safe and clean, adding that, it will also minimize the rate of dependency on men for money to buy them.

“Many parents do not provide their girls with decent sanitary towels and many others do not educate them on what they ought to know with the onset of their menses, leaving them to figure things out”, she added.

Mrs Asiedu Addo was speaking at the Central Regional Department of Gender, Mentorship Monitoring Outreach in the Mfantseman municipality.

The aim of the outreach programme was to monitor and interact with beneficiaries of last year's "mentorship and girls' empowerment summit", to sustain engagement with the girls and teacher mentors and to introduce other girls in the schools to some mentors.

Mrs Asiedu-Addo stressed that the use of unhygienic, poorly managed rags as sanitary towels posed a risk and worrying concern than just a blood stain on a girl’s dress.

She added that bacteria may cause infections which would enter the vagina and travel up the uterine cavity and may affect the girl’s reproductive health.

“It is necessary for mothers to educate their female children on the need to use hygienic materials during menstruation. Even if they are using rags they must be clean and kept right. They must be ironed before use,” she stated.

Mrs Asiedu Addo said a girl who is uncomfortable during her menses and is likely to miss school.

"Missing schools several days every month is certainly going to affect a girls academic work," she said and called on particularly mothers to work harder to keep the girls in school.

For her part, Central Regional Director of the Department of Gender, Mrs Thywill Kpe urged the girls in particular to dream big and commit with determination to achieve their goals.

“You have no excuse not to study hard. We must strive to achieve your goals” she told them.

She noted that the Sustainable Development Goals would not be achieved if all children were not encourage to stay in school and coached to optimize their potentials.

Mrs Kpe said the program was a follow up to a mentorship workshop held in cape coast last year to train some girls as peer mentors for the communities and to access the impact of the peer mentors on other girls.