Ghana’s Tax on Sanitary Pads makes Education Expensive for School Girls.Video#
The institutions responsible for promoting equity and quality education for all and provide opportunities for life long learning especially so as to achieve our Sustainable Development Goal 4 have vomited out the unforseen circumstances hindering Girl’s child Education in Ghana. In fact Ghana’s Tax on Sanitary Pads makes Education Expensive for School Girls.Video#.
This issue became prudent after government placed heavy tax on the importations of Sanitary pads in to the country. Most students from deprived communities with financial challenges need to stop coming to school during their monthly cycle. This is because due to financial difficulties, this young girls are forced to dive their attention to the use of local materials which are not scientifically proven such as rug and pieces of cloth to substitute sanitary pads.
Since this requires constant changing, bringing them to school can be devastating and embarrassing since they can easily soil themselves with
Blood. Assistant headmistress of one basic school with the name withheld for security reasons disclosed that, their school has high population of girls relatively to their counterpart boys. In terms of academic performance these girl are extremely smarter than The boys, but due to the issue of sanitary pads their academic performance are depreciating appreciable due to constant absenteem during their period.
She testified that, girls of today experience their menarche much more earlier than before. Some girls in the lower primary are not let out. This shows that the issue is critical hence government must interven.The business men and women who deem it neccessary to engage them selves in sanitary pads importation publicly lamented that, the taxing system of the pads makes them incapacitated to even break even.
They rather run at lost after importing these pads into Ghana . Due to this canker only few people are still engaging themselves in the Sanitary importation business. This has forced the few left to increase the prices of the pads exponentially in other to keep their businesses moving. This has significantly shot up the cost of sanitary pads in the market making it too expensive for the poor school girl to afford.
Those producing the pads locally in Ghana making use of our raw materials are also complaining of the tax government imposed on the production. All these are contributing to the high prices of the pads.
After the issue was highlighted, Minister for Gender has called on NGO’s and government to help keep our girls in school as said by Dr. James Emmanuel Kwegyir Aggrey ” if you educate a man, you educate an individual but if you educate a woman, you educate a whole nation”
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