MOONVALLEY FOUNDATION

“I loved netball so much when I was in school. I was part of the netball team, we used to go to other schools to compete. I do not play anymore, when I see the team training to go and play, I get the desire to be part of them, but I cannot. Now that I have a baby, I want to learn how to sew, so I can take care of my child.”

 

When I began my first photography project, I wanted to work on something that was meaningful to me. For two years, I documented the lives of 6 teenage mothers in a small community through photography; what were their lives like before their pregnancy? What did they use to dream of? And most importantly, what do they dream of now?

In the third year of documentation, I mobilized resources from some colleagues, and we founded MoonValley Foundation to support these girls and other girls in same similar situations. We created a youth-led initiative that uses a community-based participatory action approach to work with communities to define youth reproductive health problems and devise solutions to them. The community mobilized to setup the space for the vocational training, and we employed a vocational teacher who journeys 66km each day, 3 times each week to the community to teach the girls. Here is a recording of my interview on one of Ghana’s youth favored television stations on MoonValley https://cutt.ly/jK8eBcs

​

Currently, in its first months, the foundation supports 9 girls and teenage mothers with vocation skills training, and reproductive health education in rural communities in the Eastern region of Ghana. In most communities in Ghana, teenage girls face challenges with access to reproductive health information and services. Accessing any kind of sexual reproductive health information is highly stigmatized. Reproductive health services in themselves are limited and require many miles of journeying to access. Girls are at a greater disadvantage as the lack of such services and poverty often results in teenage pregnancy. Once we fail to provide sexually active adolescents with the services they need to practice safe sex, we continue to fail them into an abyss.