CONSULTATIVE AND VALIDATION WORKSHOP ON STREET CONNECTED CHILDREN

A one-day stakeholders’ consultative and validation workshop on ‘street connected children’ was organized in Accra on Thursday, 28^th October, 2021 in Accra. It was organised by the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection (MoGCSP) with support from UNICEF.

The essence of the workshop was to enable the Ministry and its relevant stakeholders strategize and develop a plan to effectively address the issue of street connected children. Over the years, the Ministry and its stakeholders have been working actively to rehabilitate children on the street through diverse initiatives and continues to intensively engage stakeholders to develop a plan of action to resolve the issue of Street Connected Children through a Child Rights base approach.

Delivering the keynote address, Hon. Cecilia Abena Dapaah, Caretaker Minister for MoGCSP said the phenomenon of street children is the most obvious manifestation of child neglect on the part of adults. She said, “Child neglect is a form of abuse in which the caregiver fails to provide for the child resulting in physical, emotional, psychological, or even educational harm to the young one.”

She indicated that His Excellency, the President, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo is very concerned about the situation hence the introduction of the Free SHS as part of efforts to get children off the streets.

Hon. Cecilia Abena Dapaah disclosed that in 2017, the Ministry identified 4,853 street peasants who include children with a total of 4,165 eligible to get formal education. Less than 200 of the total number have been rescued and reunited with their families and are in school as of May 2021.

She further disclosed that the Department of Social Welfare in 2014, established through findings of a census on street children in the Greater Accra Region that an estimated 61,492 children are growing up on the streets of Accra as of 2011 made up 66% migrant children and 18% urban dwellers among other smaller groups.

“Poverty, peer pressure, false perception of city life, the glittering lights and unreasonable parenting are the major causes attributable to the menace in addition to neglect of guardian or parenting responsibilities”. she noted.

Hon. Cecilia Abena Dapaah stated that the Ministry has made attempts in the past to address streetism which was a broad term used to encompass the desperate situation of people who are forced to spend most of their time outside their homes, engaging in menial income-generating activities in order to survive, and often having to sleep on the streets

She urged stakeholders to come up with concrete solutions to enable the government to have a diversity of approaches to use to address streetism in Ghana.

The Chief Director for the Ministry, Dr. Afisah Zakariah in her opening statement admonished stakeholders to participate and collaborate with each other in order to come out with a collective and concrete document that can be implemented to address the issues of street connected children in Ghana. “We need a collective effort and inputs from all of you to be able to tackle it holistically”. She stressed.

Mohammed Rafiq Khan, a Chief Child Protection Specialist from UNICEF-Ghana, in his statement urged participants to come out with solutions to end the menace of streetism while appealing to the government to respect the ECOWAS agreed standards on street children and refer to the document when planning.

The Workshop offered stakeholders the opportunity to review and make inputs into the proposed National Policy and Plan of Action on street connected children and legislative reforms. Participants were drawn from the Ghana Police Service, Ghana Immigration Service, UNICEF, CSO’s, FBO’s, NADMO, CHRAJ amongst others.

Source: MoGCSP