Eighteen out of the 1,113 female candidates who wrote this year's Basic Education Certificate Examinations (BECE) in the two Dormaa districts were pregnant.
One of them delivered barely 72 hours after taking the last paper, Mrs. Charity Afari-Mintah, Dormaa Municipal Girl Child Education Co-ordinator, told the GNA in an interview.
She attributed pregnancy among basic school girls to "sheer adventurism and their growing desire to experiment lessons learnt in school".
She dismissed the notion that the pupils were victims of ignorance, saying stakeholders hand rolled out enough education on sex and the negative result of early sex that should have deterred them.
"Apart from the numerous on-going sex education programmes in the area queen mothers and female role models are also doing their best to promote moral chastity among the girls", Mrs Mintah-Afari said.
She suggested reviving traditional practices that compelled teenage girls to shy away from early sex and appealed to parents of the affected girls not to abandon them to their fate but to support them to further their education.
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