PARENT TEEN COMMUNICATION AND HOW IT CAN CURB TEENAGE PREGNANCY IN THE LA NKWANTANANG DISTRICT

SITUATIONAL ANALYSIS

Aboma is a suburb in Pantang village under the La Nkwantanang district which is located in the Greater Accra Region. It is one of the 16 Metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies in the region and was created in 2012. It has recorded high increase in teenage pregnancies. Statics from the Ghana Health Service indicates that adolescents between the ages of 10 – 19years visit the various hospitals in the municipality for antenatal care. This represents an average of 6.3 percent of the adolescent population which is likely to increase looking at the trend.

 The statistics also indicates that an average of 6.3% of the adolescent population attend Ante-natal care with ages 10-14 recording 0.13% and 15-19 recording 6.2%. The General Fertility Rate is 71.7 births per 1000 women aged 15- 49 years which is the second largest for the region.

Some contributing factors to the increase in Teenage pregnancies includes Parents Shy away from issues of sex education with the believe that the child would become promiscuous. Parents discourage their children to participate in any informative discussion about sex.

ADVERTISING OBJECTIVE

The advertising objective is to generate awareness on the importance of parent teen communication and how it can curb teenage pregnancy by 50% among 60% of the people in La Nkwantanang by the end of 2017.

MEDIA OBJECTIVE

The media objective of this project is to increase the awareness on the importance of teen parent communication to curb teenage pregnancy in Aboma of the La Nkwantanang district by using broadcast, outdoor and print media to reach 50% of parents with adolescents and teenagers between the ages of thirteen to nineteen (13- 19) over a period of one year which can have the current rate of 6.3% dropped to 2% after the campaign.

MEDIA STRATEGY

Media plays an important role in the dissemination of information in communication. The mode of communication can affect a message and the intended audience negatively or positively. In other words, the acceptance of a message depends on the mode of communication. In this campaign, we intend using outdoor, broadcast and print to disseminate our message to the locality.

·       Print media is our primary media. We will use leaflets and posters and adult literacy books. Posters will be used because it has a broad reach and easily meets out target group. During health clubs or community, flipcharts will be used to depict the need for communication between parents and their teenagers. Adult literacy and school books will also be used as it will remind the community of discussions. They are accessible to the locality because they use the local languages. Since they include number of pictures and drawings, they are excellent way of encouraging interaction between parents and their teenagers to learn more about the issue.

·         Outdoor media includes bill boards. As a community, having a bill board with the image of a teenager at the entrance to the community as well as the community school will serve as a reminder to both parents and teenagers. The bill board will have inscriptions in the Ga dialect as well. Outdoor will be used because of its geographical flexibility and wide coverage of local markets. It is the largest size print advertising available an d it has high summer visibility as well as around- the –clock exposure

·         Broadcast is another form of media we will be using in our advertising campaign. Broadcast includes radio and TV but for this campaign we will focus on only radio as most of the locals are ardent radio listeners. Radio will be used because is the excellent mode of communication for mobile populations and it has local coverage availability. It is able to reach special kind of target audience as well. Radio will enable call in sessions where we will have Peer educators who will educate the community on the importance of teen parent communication on the lives of their teenagers. Information centers in the municipality will be used to our advantage. The information centers run in the early hours of the morning and later in the evenings thus the flow of adolescent health information would be in flight. All these transmissions will be done in Ga.

EVALUATION

In evaluating this plan, we will send out field researchers to conduct interviews with the people of La Nkwantanang to come out with report on how they feel towards a particular media vehicle and how readily they receive information from them. The evaluation of the plan will help us identify which media vehicle to use and if we should mix them in order to drive home our message or not. From the research, the feedback we will receive will inform us on how effective our media strategy is or not and if we have to make some changes or start all over. In order to know if our campaign was aired as planned in relation to radio, we will ask for affidavits to confirm our spot was aired.