The Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection (MoGCSP) has held a consultative and validation workshop on street children as part of efforts to proffer solutions to the challenge.
The Ministry is trying to develop a child-rights based approach to handle the problem of children living on the streets and depart from past strategies where children have been taken off the streets to residential homes and shelters for assessment and care while finding a lasting family environment for them.
Street children include boys and girls aged under 18 years for whom the streets, including unoccupied dwellings and wastelands, have become the home and a source of livelihood and who are inadequately protected or supervised.
The core objective of the engagement is to secure inputs and develop a plan that meets all relevant stakeholders to help street children receive care and protection and stay away from the streets.
Delivering the keynote address, Minister for Sanitation and Water Resources and Caretaker Minister for Gender, Children and Social Protection, Madam Cecilia Abena Dapaah, disclosed that in 2017 the Ministry identified 4,853 street peasants who include children and a total of 4,165 eligible to get formal education.
Less than 200, she said have been reunited with their families and in school as of May 2021.
National Security, she said, through a monitoring exercise also identified hotspots of children and families totalling about 2,000 on the streets of Accra, and Kumasi but mostly made up of foreign nationals.
She added 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, she said, are the major causes attributable to the menace in addition to neglect of guardian or parenting responsibilities.
“The phenomenon of street children and now street adults as well, 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.”
“There have been 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 added.
She assured that the doors of the Ministry are open for groups and individuals to proffer solutions to the streetism challenge in order for the government to develop a holistic approach to address the situation.
She assured that 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 of the streets.
She urged stakeholders to come up with a basket of solutions to enable the government to have a diversity of approaches to use to address streetism in Ghana.
Unicef Ghana Representative, Mohammed Rafiq Khan, in his statement urged the participants to consider street children as rights holders and take this into consideration in all decisions.
He appealed to the government to respect the ECOWAS agreed standards on street children and refer to the document when planning anything about them.
He warned that it is not advisable to scoop up children of foreign nationals from the streets and send them back to their home states because a lot of them come from Mali, Burkina Faso among other parts of West Africa where they are at risk of being recruited by militants as child soldiers to fight.
Source: Mypublisher24.com/Osumanu Al-Hassan