Plan International Ghana, an NGO, has condemned the practice of child, early and forced marriages and called for their prohibition.
The organisation believed that the minimum age for marriage should be 18 and should apply equally to both men and women regardless of any parental or judicial consent.
the Acting Country Director of Plan International Ghana, Ahensah Asum-Kwarteng, said this at this year’s National Girls’ Camp in Accra on the theme: “Empowering Girls to Thrive, the Responsibility of All”.
The four-day Camp was to build the capacity of young girls from selected schools in the Northern, Eastern and the Upper West regions, using Plan International’s champions of change curriculum.
Research revealed that every minute, 30 girls across the world become child brides, everyday more than 41,000 girls marry before the age of 18 with one in three of most recently married child brides being in sub-Saharan African countries, including Ghana.
Mr Asum-Kwarteng said the statistics also revealed that, every year thousands of young girls in Africa fall in the cold hands of death because they are married off at an age when their tender bodies cannot sustain the trauma of pregnancy and delivery.
Mr Asum-Kwarteng said Plan Ghana recognised that education was a powerful tool for preventing child, early and forced marriage, adding that girls who benefited from quality education were less likely to marry while they were still children.
He called on government and stakeholders to ensure that all girls, including married girls, could access and complete primary and secondary education in line with the commitment to the 2030 Agenda.
The Deputy Director of Basic Education Division at the GES, Mrs Benedicta Tenni Seidu, advised young girls to stay away from sex and report any advances made at them by men to their parents.
Mrs Seidu urged the girls to avoid love for materials things, since such practices could lead them to pregnancy by irresponsible men and truncate their education.
She urged parents not to use their children as collateral for marriage because of poverty adding; “It is a crime to force a child to marry at a tender age.”
