By
Anthony Apubeo, GNA
Zanlerigu (U/E),
Jan. 9, GNA – Link Community Development, a charitable non-profit organisation,
has enrolled about 250 deprived and out-of-school girls in the Nabdam District
of the Upper East Region onto informal education.
The initiative,
which seeks to empower the girls aged 15 to 19 years, is part of a four-year
project dubbed; “Strategic Approaches to Girl-Child Education (STAGE)”.
It has funding
support from the Department for International Development (DFID), a United
Kingdom development agency, through the World Education.
The underprivileged
girls would go through six to seven months tuition in literacy and numeracy as
well as vocational training to empower them economically to live dignified
lives.
In an interview with
the Ghana News Agency at Zanlerigu, one of the training communities, Mr Joachim
Faara, the Project Coordinator for Link Community Development, said the informal
aspect of STAGE was being implemented in only 10 communities in the Nabdam
District.
He said 25
vulnerable girls in each community were benefitting from the seven months
vocational training that would include bakery, dressmaking, weaving, tie-and-dye
designing and hairdressing.
The girls would be
supported to start their own businesses after training while those wishing to
further their education in formal vocational schools would also be supported,
he said.
Mr Faara said the
initiative sought to offer some form of competencies and income generating
skills to enable the girls fend for themselves.
The formal aspect of
the STAGE project is being implemented at Bongo, Nabdam, Kassena-Nankana West
and Bawku West districts for over 2,000 out-of-school girls, aged between 10 to
14 years, who would be mainstreamed into the formal education sector.
Mr Maxwell Divom,
the Assemblyman-elect of the Zanlerigu-Daaliga Electoral Area, applauded the
initiative to empower the girls and said it would go a long way to relieve them
of extreme economic hardships.
He said most of them
got married at the expense of their education due to poverty and other related
factors and expressed the hope that the beneficiaries would take the training
seriously and reap maximum benefits.
The girls expressed
gratitude to the charitable organisation and said the training would afford
them the opportunity to be provided with basic numeracy and literacy education
as well as vocational skills.
Ms Beatrice Kihimbo,
a beneficiary who plans to learn bakery, said as a result of poverty she got
married without a profession and that the project would provide her with
employable skills to generate income to take care of herself and family.
Link Community Development,
now Link Ghana, was established in 1999 with the vision of offering
opportunities to marginalised children, through education, to fight poverty.
GNA