During the national dialogue on sexual and gender-based violence in a COVID-19 pandemic: Prevalence, drivers and response measures conference held by the STAR-Ghana Foundation, a rapid assessment study by Bashiratu Kamal, a gender and labour expert shared that Indomie is one of the causes of the skyrocketing number of teenage pregnancies in Ghana.
Due to the levels of poverty in Ghana, especially now during the Covid-19 pandemic, young girls are being pushed into transactional intercourse in which men would promise them items in return.
These items include Indomie, mobile credit and mobile money.
During the assessment, Bashiratu shared that, “In some cases, there are issues of ‘transactional sex’, where some parents also encourage their children to go in for it, so that they can get enough to support themselves.”
She went on to explain a situation where a mother encouraged her daughter to participate in ‘transactional sex’ because she believed that the man could help her daughter more than she could.
Bashiratu included that even the term ‘indomie’ has been translated to an offer for a transaction, sex for anything you could give.
“Their parents are not working, they are at home and they need to survive. So they do this to get money.”
This showcases how bad poverty is affecting not just adults, but youngsters in the country if they have to resort to exploitation and sex in order to survive.
We can only hope that the Ghanian authorities look into the matter of helping school girls (and school children regardless of gender) so that they would never have to turn to sexual intercourse as a way to feed themselves.
What do you think about this? Let us know in the comment section.
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