The girls who are junior high school students were aged between 15 and 16 and were rescued in 2023, by the Department of Gender in the Bono Region.

Ms Adii said three victims were rescued at New Dormaa near Sunyani, one in Dormaa and the last girl, who travelled from the North East Region, was also rescued at a village near Sunyani.

She said three of them were back in school to pursue their education while one was learning a trade.

The other one, however, could not be traced.

Courtesy call

This came to light when the British High Commissioner to Ghana, Harriet Thompson, paid a courtesy call on the Bono Regional Minister and interacted with heads of departments in Sunyani last Wednesday as part of her two-day visit to the region.

As part of the visit, she also had a closed-door meeting with the Catholic Bishop of Sunyani, Most Reverend Matthew Kwasi Gyamfi, visited the Pangolin Conservation and had dinner with the regional executives of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and New Patriotic Party (NPP), among others.

At the meeting with the heads of departments, they were given the opportunity to brief the commissioner on the state of their departments.

Monitoring

Ms Adii said the department was monitoring the victims' movements and their stay in school.

She explained that the menace was increasing across various parts of the region, including Sunyani, the regional capital.

She expressed worry about the increasing cases of child marriage, explaining that the five were the only cases that had been reported to the department and believed that there were more unreported cases.

Difficulty

She said it was difficult to rescue victims because it always became a tussle between officials of the department, parents and the victims.

She said some parents had after the department’s intervention, disowned their children for refusing to marry partners chosen for them to get married.

Ms Adii explained that such abandoned children became a burden to the department.

Resources

She said the most difficult aspect was the lack of resources and shelter in the Bono, Bono East or Ahafo regions to accommodate such victims.

"With the issue of child marriage, we need to look at it as a holistic approach to see how we can help these girls.

"It is not enough rescuing them; we have to support them to stand on their feet," she said.

Ms Adii said the office was relying solely on government resources and funds from the pockets of its officials to respond to some of the issues.

That, according to her, was woefully inadequate to operate and called on donors to provide the needed support for the efficient operation of the department. 

Interested

For her part, Ms Thompson said some of the presentations captured areas the British High Commission was interested in.

She assured of her outfit’s readiness to support in the areas they could.

For her part, the Bono Regional Minister, Justina Owusu-Banahene, thanked Ms Thompson for her visit and called on her to partner with the Bono Regional Coordinating Council to solve some of the problems enumerated during the presentations.