UNITED Nations Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin has urged governments to invest in the empowerment of the country’s teenage girls as a push towards achieving gender equality.In delivering her World Population Day message at the Stakeholders Symposium on Investing in Teenagers, hosted at the Arthur Chung Convention Centre on July 11, Osotimehin said this investment should be in a way that ensures them equal opportunities and the power to influence community development.

She said this should be in ways that empower them to make important life decisions and equip them to one day earn a living, engage in the affairs of their communities and be on an equal footing with their male counterparts.

Such investments are also needed to protect their health, including their sexual and reproductive health, and as opportunities for a quality education, expanding economic opportunities, including those for decent work. Osotimehin said an empowered teen whose rights are respected and who is able to realise her full potential is more likely to contribute to the economic and social progress of community and country.

“The teenage years are for some girls a time of exploration, learning and increasing autonomy. But for many others, it is a time of increasing vulnerability and exclusion from rights and opportunities, or just plain discrimination,” she explained.

She said any teenage girl who has the power, means and information to independently make decisions, is more likely to overcome obstacles standing between her and a healthy, productive future, not only to benefit herself, but also her family and community.

One who has no say in decisions concerning her education, health, work or even marital status, “may never realise her full potential or become a positive force for transformation in her home, community and nation.”

In some parts of the world, she said, “A girl who reaches puberty is deemed by her family or community as ready for marriage, pregnancy and childbirth. She may be married off and forced to leave school. She may suffer a debilitating condition, such as fistula, from delivering a child before her body is ready for it. She may be denied her human rights.”

Meanwhile, Minister of Social Cohesion, Amna Ally, said government should see investment in children as a necessary and moral requirement for creating an enabling environment to accommodate sustained and equitable long-term growth of our nation.
“Guyana needs every single child or teenage boys and girls to thrive in order to support a future of high productivity, innovation, economic growth and improved social cohesion.”
With this in mind, she said Guyana must never grow weary of highlighting the importance of investing in its children, and must seek to establish policies and programme-oriented goals to facilitate the development of the children’s full potential.
“Interventions and policy choices made today will determine whether our children and teenagers are able to reach their full potential, or are left to face a future of inequity and marginalisation,” Ally said.
A socially cohesive society can only be built on investment in youths. The minister explained that since families are the foundation of communities, there is a clear tie between cohesive families and cohesive communities. Strong family ties can be an effective source of civic cohesion.
“The family is the first institution to teach “habits of the heart” and discourage the worst excesses of individualism by emphasising responsibilities to others. Ideally, children develop a sense of how to establish positive relationships, their rights and duties,how to function and acquire essential life skills by seeing how their parents react to them, to any siblings, to each other and to other members within communities,” Minister Ally said.