Reproductive Health Education and Services for Adolescent Girls.

The project aims to empower adolescent girls in Ghana including those most-vulnerable through the provision and access to gender-responsive comprehensive sexuality education and youth-friendly sexual and reproductive health services including family planning and contraception. Teachers are not trained or provided with the material required to properly engage with adolescents on sexuality education. Furthermore there is also limited access to gender-sensitive and youth-friendly sexual and reproductive health services. Project activities include: (1) training teachers to deliver standardized gender-sensitive and youth-friendly comprehensive sexuality education; (2) creating new and strengthen existing adolescent health clubs; (3) delivering comprehensive sexuality education to adolescent girls; (4) training frontline health care workers in the provision of youth-friendly and gender-sensitive services; (5) increasing the number of health facilities providing quality adolescent friendly health services; (6) raising awareness of adolescent girls to increase the demand for family planning; (7) strengthening procurement supply and logistics management system for last mile distribution of contraceptives to young people; and (8) engaging in social and behaviour change communication to raise awareness on gender equality and create an enabling environment for adolescent girls to defend promote and exercise their sexual and reproductive rights.

The expected outcomes for this project include: (1) improved access of adolescent girls to comprehensive sexuality education; (2) improved access of adolescent girls to youth-friendly and gender-sensitive sexual and reproductive health services; and (3) increased capacities for adolescent girls to defend and promote their sexual and reproductive rights. Results achieved as of March 2023 include: (1) 1 676 officials from the Ghana Education Service and 15 764 school teachers including civil society professionals trained on the national guidelines on Reproductive Health Education (RHE) and the guidelines for prevention and management of teenage pregnancy cases in 2 418 schools (including 62 special schools) in 34 districts; (2) 417 school health clubs delivered safe-space programmes and engaged over 297 591 adolescent girls and boys on RHE; (3) Over 10 852 health professionals adolescent health focal points and frontline staff received orientation on the RHE guidelines and delivery of youth-friendly services; (4) 474 200 girls including refugees and girls with disabilities were familiarized with and empowered to utilize available sexual and reproductive health services; and (5) 1 618 girls with disabilities improved their knowledge of sexual and reproductive health and rights including skills in basic legal literacy and rights.