A five-year strategy plan is being refined by the Ministry of Gender, Children, and Social Protection (MOGCSP) with the goal of putting an end to the problem of children running loose in the streets.
Through collaboration with key stakeholders, advocacy, and interventions that would strengthen families, the strategy aims to equally distribute funds to secure the safety, health, and education of children taken from the streets.
This was revealed at a session held yesterday in Accra to recognize International Day for Street Children with the subject "Safety for all street-connected children."
Together with some street kids, it was attended by several child protection system participants.
Every year on April 12, a day is observed to give children who live on the planet a voice. Challenges
The Department of Social Welfare's (DSW) Head of Communications, Kwame Adusei, stated that the plan also aimed to address issues like the rise in urban street children, broken family structures, the emergence of second and third generations of street children, the various forms of abuse that street children were exposed to, and the lack of scientific data on street children.
The plan's goals include lowering the obstacles that prevent children who are connected to the street from receiving necessary services, collecting data on children living on the streets around the country, and creating guidelines for handling difficulties involving street children of other nationalities.
Francisca Oteng, a deputy minister in the MOGCSP, added that the country's lack of precise data on the issue of street children made planning and programming challenging, necessitating the synchronization of that data.
"When we have this information, it will be easier for us to determine if someone else took the kids to the streets or whether they came there on their own," she continued.
According to the deputy minister, children who live on the streets are subject to both physical and moral risks since some of them are mistreated by persons who are supposed to look out for them and make sure they are secure.
Concerns
Although there have been conflicting statistics throughout the years on the number of children living on the streets in the nation, according to Rev. Dr. Comfort Asare, Director of the Department of Social Welfare, the figures are still troubling.
According to her, the Catholic Action for Street Children, an NGO, estimated there were 19,196 street children in Accra in 2002. The same year, the Ministry of Employment and Labour Relations released a report with a figure of 33,000, and in 2014, the DSW reported there were 61,492 street children in Accra.
The director said, "In 2017, the MOGCSP was able to count 4,853 youngsters, of whom 4000 were school-age.
Supportive remarks
Dr. Ernestina Tetteh, the convener of the Coalition for Street Connected Children, claimed that a lack of safety in the home had forced many kids out into the streets, where they were far from safe from peer attacks to high-level police brutality with no chance of getting justice.
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