By Michael Kofi Kenetey
The Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection, MOGCSP in collaboration with the United Nations Population Fund, UNFPA has organized a media engagement on the Child Marriage Information Portal for selected journalists in the Northern Zone at Danyame in Kumasi, the Ashanti Regional capital.
The engagement is to encourage the media to create awareness about the availability and benefits of the Child Marriage Information Portal to enable the public to report issues of child marriage and also get credible information about child marriage.
Child marriage refers to a marriage, union, or cohabitation where one or both parties are below the age of 18 years. The 1992 Constitution of Ghana stipulates that a person under the age of 18 is a child and therefore cannot marry or be given off in marriage. Although child marriage affects both sexes, girls are excessively affected.
According to 2018 UNICEF data, child marriage is high in Sub-Saharan Africa, where four out of 10 women were married before the age of 18 and though decreasing globally, still, the total number of girls married in childhood stands at 12 million per year.
A new focus has been placed on the critical importance of addressing child marriage in the new Sustainable Development Goal five which is eliminating all harmful effects, such as child, early and forced marriage and female genital mutilation with a specific target to eliminate child marriage by the year 2030.
In addition, there is a renewed call on West and Central African countries to take bold measures to end child marriage. It is for this reason that the Domestic Violence Secretariat in Ghana as part of its commitment to providing a one-stop-shop database on child marriage in Ghana, collaborated with UNFPA and developed the Child Marriage Information Portal in 2021 that readily provides information on Child Marriage, Sexual and Gender-Based Violence and its related issues in an open source by a press of a button.
In an interview with GBC News during the media engagement in Kumasi, the Head of Child Marriage Unit at the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection, Hajia Saphia Tamimu noted that the portal is to help provide the media, NGOs, and CSOs and the public who work on issues of child marriage with credible information on child marriage. She reiterated that they are working together with their partners to help eradicate child marriage in Ghana by the year 2030.
The Consultant for the Child Marriage Information Portal at UNFPA Ghana, Senanu Agbozo noted that there are various information about child marriage in Ghana hence the need to develop the portal where researchers can share and get information about child marriage in Ghana. He gave further details about the features on the Child Marriage Information Portal.
