84 pregnant girls and 46 breastfeeding teenage mothers took the 2025 Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) in the Upper East Region, much to the excitement of Ghana Education Service officials, whose job it is to ensure that girls do not drop out due to pregnancy or childbirth.
GES’s Prevention of Pregnancy Among School Girls and Facilitation of Re-entry into School after Childbirth policy aims to lower the number of adolescent pregnancies in schools and make it easier for girls who become pregnant and give birth to return to school.
135 nursing mothers and 111 pregnant girls participated in the 2025 West Africa Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) at the senior high school level.
In an interview with Bolgatanga-based Dreamz FM, Rita Mbama, the Upper East GES Gender Desk Officer, praised the policy’s effectiveness.
“So the BECE that we wrote in 2025, we had 84 pregnant girls and then 46 lactating mothers writing the BECE. One will say that this is too high and I shouldn’t say it’s an achievement. It is not that we want the girls to get pregnant, but the fact that they still stayed in school and have written these exams and have completed school. I believe that many of them will pass and continue further. Previously, if you became pregnant, you were dismissed outright.”
“It isn’t that girls were not getting pregnant; they were getting pregnant anyway, without the policy. But if you got pregnant, and you were dismissed. Many of the girls who got pregnant will just run away from school themselves. Those who we found to be pregnant were dismissed outrightly.”
“So, because of this, many of the girls were involved in abortion. Some of them, they go through the right method to abort by going to the hospital, some of them do crude abortion, and others want to stay in school and the school would dismiss them.”
“So many of them were doing abortions, and they were dying. Some were getting complications; others were dropping and marrying without a certificate,” she reiterated.
Over the years, the policy has made sure that girls who become pregnant or give birth are not denied their access to an education, despite the fact that adolescent pregnancy among schoolgirls seems to be on the rise.
Source: newsthemegh.com