The Ghana Education Service (GES) has refuted suggestions that a planned Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) being pursued is aimed at promoting lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights in the country.

The GES further added that certain additions to the CSE manual has not been approved by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NaCCA) hence the materials that have been heavily circulated on social media are yet to be eauthorised to be taught in schools.

A press release by the Head of Public Relations at the Ghana Education Service (GES), Cassandra Twum Ampofo on Monday, 30 September 2019, said: “Indeed, on the 29 of April 2019, the Ghana Education Service wrote to the Acting Executive of the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment to request the insertion of the phrase ‘within the acceptable cultural values and norms of the Ghanaian society’ in the third objective of page 3 of the CSE guidelines in circulation. The insertion has not been made yet and, therefore, GES has not finally approved the CSE guidelines being discussed on various media platforms”.

The release explained that “the new standard-based curriculum being implemented has nothing to do with LGBT issues, masturbation or explicit display/labelling of intimate body parts” as being suggested by some anti-LGBT campaign groups, the clergy and a section of the public.

GES was emphatic: “The CSE does not seek to throw out the advocacy for sexual abstinence but rather seeks to reinforce it”.

GES further noted that member states of the United Nations (UN) are mandated to roll out CSE in accordance with their cultural norms and values. 

“It is, therefore, wrong to insist that CSE, as practised in Europe or North America, has the same structures and content as are being rolled out in Ghana”.

The GES further assured that: “No special sessions have been organised or will ever be organised by the GES to train students as sexual rights advocates, let alone LGBT rights which are culturally, socially, legally, morally and religiously alien to Ghana”.

The GES insisted that under no circumstance will they implement “any programme which goes contrary to the legal, cultural norms, values and beliefs of the Ghanaian people”.