More needs to be done to ensure that young people fully understand sexual and reproductive health, according to Executive Director of the Guyana Responsible Parenthood Association (GRPA) Renata Chuck-A-Sang who also said that the country’s young need to be challenged more, educated more and provided with more options as there is more to life than what they are exposed to.
In a wide-ranging interview with the Sunday Stabroek, which focused largely on the services GRPA offers adolescents, Chuck-A-Sang said options should be provided to young people in terms of schools, jobs, businesses, as one of her pet peeves is to see people sidelined or discarded because of where they came from or for what they were not given an opportunity to learn.
Describing GRPA as a one-stop shop, Chuck-A-Sang said it currently has a subvention from government that caters specifically to the needs of adolescents and this entails counselling. With the counselling, she noted that at times people just want somebody to talk to who is nonjudgmental and they can use that person as “a sounding board.”