The Ghana Education Service (GES) will, from next term, introduce sex education into the curriculum of basic schools to equip pupils to know and experience their sexuality.
At age six, Primary One pupils will be introduced to values and societal norms and how to interact with the different sexes and groups.
As the pupils graduate to the upper primary, they will be made to study different modules of sexuality that include relationship, friendship, dating and courtship.
The guideline module for 11-year-olds in Primary Six includes fertility, pregnancy-related issues, childbirth and respecting gender differences.
This is part of the Guidelines for the Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) that is expected to integrate gender, human values and sexual and reproductive health rights perspectives into sexuality education in Ghana.
The Executive Director of the National Population Council, one of the promoters of the curriculum, Dr Leticia Adelaide Appiah, said in an interview that the focus of the CSE was to empower children to make the right choices when parents, religious leaders fail to play their roles.
Giving an alarming statistics to buttress her point, Dr Appiah said teenage pregnancy was high in the country and that in every 1,000 adolescents, there were record cases of 140 teenage pregnancies.
“It is 16 in 1000 adolescents in the developed countries, in China it is seven in 1000. These should guide what we do or don’t do,” she said.
The Ghana Education Service (GES) will, from next term, introduce sex education into the curriculum of basic schools to equip pupils to know and experience their sexuality.
At age six, Primary One pupils will be introduced to values and societal norms and how to interact with the different sexes and groups.
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