The National Population Council (NPC) has partnered with committed journalists to help propagate population issues within the country.
The partnership has become important to facilitate information sharing to enable Ghanaians to make informed decisions with regards to population and its related issues. The partnership further aims at creating effective awareness messages to change the views, behaviors and attitudes of members of society on population and development issues.
The partnership was formed after a one-day training workshop for media practitioners at the Coconut Groove Hotel in Accra. The objective of the media workshop was to share knowledge on the Population Policy which aims to ensure a healthy, educated, skilled population for family and national development and also devise ways of reducing the high level of avoidable high-risk pregnancy in the country.
The Executive Director for National Population Council (NPC), Dr. Adelaide Leticia Appiah, speaking at the opening of the training workshop, emphasized the need for knowledge sharing among media professionals to facilitate national development.
She stressed the need for Ghana to prioritize population issues adding that every country needs healthy, strong quality, reliable people to develop and grow.
She told participants that any decision one takes population planning may have good or bad effects on other individuals and the country in general.
The decision to marry one or more women, give birth to a number of kids must be properly thought out because childbirth is a by product of marriage and the children brought out must be well fed, well catered for better growth,” she stressed.
According to Dr. Appiah, giving birth to children without proper care puts pressure on the parents, citizens and the state on what she termed ‘Tyranny of Small Decisions. “Such poor decisions will lead to the struggle of the country’s scarce resources, infrastructure and facilities as too many people will be fighting for few of such things.”
The Executive Director explained that, elsewhere, population issues are of prior concern, and it had helped them plan and provide for the needs of sizeable people without much stress. She used the principles of: Tragedy of the Commons; Butterfly or Ripple Effects; Lily in The Pond; Tyranny of Small Decisions To explain her method of population control systems to avoid the dire consequences, and this had sustained their economy and their life expectancy is around 72 years whiles in Africa it’s 62 years or low.
Dr Leticia Appiah also spoke against child marriages and defilements of young girls that often result in teenage pregnancies and causes of fistula. She also advised women to use protective sexual kits to avoid unwanted pregnancies. She allayed the fears of women of side effects in the use of these kits because they are very negligible and help but rather help in spacing births and avoiding unwanted pregnancies.