Wednesday marked the 10th Anniversary of the International Day of the Girl-Child, with Ghana joining the world to mark the special day.
The event is usually used to observe and celebrate the achievements of the girl-child in a patriarchal world, where the male usually has the upper hand in every decision of the family and state than the female.
It is also used to highlight challenges such as early marriage and lack of access to education and other challenges which prevent young girls from reaching their full potential.
The Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) made a startling revelation based on research it had carried out on the girl-child in its 2021 Population and Housing Census.
The report said that almost 80,000 girls in Ghana, aged between 12 and 17 years, were already married or living with a man. The report further revealed that nearly 26,000 of these figures were girls in Junior High School and aged between 12 and 14 years.
The Chronicle finds it hard to believe that in this day and age, parents still give their young girls out for marriage when there are so many opportunities for them to exhibit their full potentials and become great persons in society.
Programmes such as Girls in ICT (Information and Communications Technology); Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM), Sports and many more, have been deliberately designed to enable the girl-child exhibit her God-given skills and talents, and to contribute their quota to society.
Girls who receive education are less likely to marry young and are more likely to lead healthy and productive lives. They would earn higher incomes, participate in the decisions that mostly affect them and build better futures for themselves and their families.
In Ghana, there are examples of women who have demonstrated to the world that if the girl-child is given education, she can thrive in any area of life if only the right resources required for such growth are available.
We can mention the likes of Regina Honu of Soronko Solutions and Lucy Quist, former Chief Executive Officer of Airtel, in the area of technology. There are also women who are Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) in banks, media organisations and industry among others.
It is, therefore, surprising that some parents continue to give out their girl-child in marriages in this day and age.
We believe it is high time government enacts laws to deal with such parents who destroy the future of their girls. If the laws already exist then they must be enforced.
The other leg of the GSS data which came as no surprise was the situation of the girl-child in Northern Ghana.
The report showed that regions with the highest percentage of girls in marriage are in the North East (13.0%), Savannah (10.9%) and Northern (10.6%) regions, all with rates more than twice the national average (4.0%).
Also, despite the free and compulsory universal basic education, almost a quarter of a million girls (244,731) aged 6 to 14 years have never attended school at all and indicated that three out of every 10 of these girls are in the Northern Region which has the highest number of girls who have never attended school (73,516) followed by the Savannah (27,930) and North East (22,857) regions.
This comes as no surprise to us, since child marriage in the North and its resultant effect on education is something that many have spoken about.
Maybe it is time to have the conversation the President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, spoke about when he addressed Ghanaians who attended the Global Citizen Festival.
The President, who is the Co-Chair of the UN Sustainable Development Goals and an AU gender champion, said he is committed to putting in place policies and programmes aimed at improving the development of the girl child in Ghana. He, therefore, called for a collective commitment of all major stakeholders to put in place measures that would protect the girl child.
We at The Chronicle are calling on the President and all stakeholders to come to the consultation table, fashion out a plan to deal with this child marriage canker that is robbing our young girls of their bright future.
