Link Ghana to empower over 2,000 vulnerable out of school girls

Bolgatanga, Nov 29, GNA - About 2,133 extremely vulnerable out-of-school girls from four districts in the Upper East Region are set to be empowered and transitioned into the formal education system in December 2019.

Link Community Development, a charitable non-profit organisation with funding support from the Department for International Development (DFID), a United Kingdom development agency through the World Education, have embarked on a programme to train young girls aged from 10 to 14 years in basics of formal academic education before mainstreaming them into the formal education sector.

The girls would further be supported to stay in school until they optimised their opportunities.

The four-year programme dubbed, “Strategic Approaches to Girls-Child Education (STAGE)” would benefit extremely vulnerable out of school young girls in the Bongo, Nabdam, Kassena-Nankana West and Bawku West Districts.

Mr Joachim Faara, the Project Coordinator for Link Community Development, said this in an interview with the Ghana News Agency, at a 10-day training of facilitators in Bolgatanga.

The first phase of the programme, which is scheduled to start in December, 2019, has 79 facilitators being trained to handle and take the the already identified girls through the classes for nine months.

According to the Project Coordinator, the young girls would be taught numeracy and literacy and life skills using the local language, while being taught the tenets of the English Language in the final two months to prepare them for primary school enrolment.

Mr Faara indicated that there would be 79 classes across the beneficiary districts and Link Community Development had already engaged management of the schools where the classes would be taken place.

Once the programme starts, classes will be held every day after school hours, he added.

He said the programme would give opportunity to young girls who drop out of school as a result of poverty and those who did not even get the chance to go to school, including those living with various forms of disabilities to be educated.

He said the girls would be taken through intensive training and tuition so as to equip them with catch up class competencies to start their formal education system at the primary level.

He said there was another component of the project to train deprived girls in vocational and technical knowledge and skills and it would begin next year.

At the Kassena-Nankana West, 31 facilitators were being trained while in the Bongo, Bawku West and Nabdam districts 22, 18 and eight facilitators respectively were being trained.

During separate monitoring visits to the training centres, the master trainers and the facilitators commended Link Ghana for the initiative to give opportunity to the vulnerable young girls in their areas to have a better future.

They explained that records about girl child education in the various districts and the region as a whole was worrying as most parents due to limited resources preferred to educate only male children.

The Link Community Development, now Link Ghana was established in 1999 with a vision of offering opportunities to marginalised children to use education as a weapon to help fight poverty.

GNA