AFRICANEWS

Ghana

Set the innocent children free

As poverty level rises, some people have taken the advantage to abuse children selling them to Alhajis who exploit them as labourers in their homes and farms. The chidren work under poor conditions. Some manage to return home but others never see their homes again.

A couple of years ago an officer from Response, an umbrella NGO working for children's welfare visited Sunyani, the capital of the Brong Ahafo Region of Ghana. Hediscoveredroomsof about 10 by 12 feet without windows, eachharbouring about 45 children from the Northern Region. �In all, there were about 250 of suchmigrants in that house owned by some Alhajis from the northern part of the country. It turns out that these Alhajis receive consignments ofboys from 'child contractors'for a fee. The room was one ofseveral 'collection depots' in Sunyani and others in the country set up to recruit child labourers.

Theseteenagers work in farms, chopbars and draw push carts or do porterage, but they never see the revenues they earn. They are fed once a day and taught Arabic at the weekend. Thelucky ones may one day return to their parents, but some never see their parents again. This practice which is widespread in Ghana was the subject of aheated discussion at a seminar held in November aimed at identifying a way to reduce street children as the nation enters the next millennium. Streetism in Ghana used to connote the youth, teenagers and kids, but an ugly twistis the increasing number of babies who are being born on the streets. All over the big cities, the sight of young girls between the ages of 13 and 17 carrying babies is fast replacing elderly people begging on the streets. The exact number ofstreet children is very difficult to document, however, there is ample evidence to demonstrate that the phenomenon has been increasing over the last five years. The reality has in fact caught Ghanaians unaware and exposedthe government's weak control over the problem.

The seminar brought to the fore the bizarre conditions young street dwellers live in. Some sleep on pavements, in front of shops or makeshift cardboard houses. The result is the increasing number of rape and teenage pregnancies in the country's urban centres. ProfessorNana Araba Apt, Headof the Department of Sociology at the University of Ghana said that many of the street kids are rural migrants who invade the cities in search of non-existent jobs. Others especially girls claim they were running away from forced marriages and broken homes. Unfortunately, they end up on the streets, with most of the girls getting pregnant. According toProf Apt most of these children are mostly fromnorthern Ghana where they are deeply embedded in family structures and are responsive to their families' cash requirements. "They are obedient in remitting their earned incomes back to their parents in the north and expect to return permanently to their family contexts. Most of them land in the market places, railway stations, lorry stations, and they manage to survive carrying heavy loads", she said.

The seminar identified the problem of street children as a spillover of poverty from the districts and unless poverty is curbed in the hinterland, efforts at clearing the streets of children would be futile. Ghana is one of the poorest countries in Africa. Two recentsurveys by the World Bank and Government of Ghana concluded that 32 per cent or approximately five million Ghanaians had incomes less than $30 per month. Fifteen per cent of Ghanaians were described as living under conditions of absolute poverty. The rural north is particularly poverty-stricken. In the Upper West, Northern and Upper East Regions, 56.1 per cent, 44.1 per cent and 32.6 per cent of the population respectively live below the poverty line.

With these figures, it looks like rural urban drift would continue for a while and any programme to rid the streets of infants will not make any meaningful impact.
A number of NGOs have taken over the challenge and are working assiduously to ameliorate the pains of the children. One of these organisations is Response, an umbrella for 35 NGOs offering services in education, health, skills, training, guidance and counselling, sports and others to get the kids offthe streets and from hazardous existence. Actionaid, Ghana is one NGO that is working inBawku and Tamale in the north. In Bawku, where the shepherd system is in operation, boys and girls are given lessons from 6.30 to 11 am after which they go home to help their parents in economic activities. After three years they are enrolled into the normal school system.

At the Tamale street children's project ,children between the ages of six and 13 who have never been to school before are intensely prepared for a year, after which they are placed into formal schools. An evaluation of the system has shown that the kids are able to compete favourably with their mates who started class one. Actionaid says the two systems have significantly reduced potential migration among children of this age group.

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