Accra, Oct. 29, GNA — Mrs Cecelia Dapaah, Caretaker Minister of Gender, Children and Social Protection, has called on all stakeholders to collaborate and work on ending streetism in the country.
She said there was the need for collective effort from stakeholders to find sustainable solutions to the issues of streetism.
Mrs Dapaah made the call at a stakeholders’ consultation and validation workshop organised by the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection (MoGCSP), on street connected children to strategise on how to get them off the streets.
Streetism is 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 said it was necessary to find solutions that would be relevant to the country’s socio cultural setting while involving some parents on the streets with their children in finding solutions to the problem.
“I’ll be doing that next week with a team to go to the field and find out, and also we should also be sure of the sensitivity of the cultural and religious aspects of these things, I’m happy that the rep of the chief Imam is here.We are blessed with a chief imam who is the repository of wisdom and warmth and we will be happy to work with him also to find solutions to this nagging problem,” she said.
The Caretaker Minister expressed worry on the existing problem of streetism which had become worse, in spite of the numerous attempts in the past to address it.
She said, the MoGCSP through the Department of Social Welfare (DSW) in 2017, had identified 4853 Street peasants including children, a total of 4165 were eligible to get formal education, but less than 200 had reunited with their families and had been in school in May 2021.
The national security, Mrs Dapaah said, through a monitoring exercise had also identified hotspots of children and families totaling about 2000 on the streets of Accra and Kumasi, who had been mostly foreign nationals.
She stated that findings in a report by the DSW in 2014 on street children in the Greater Accra region, estimated that about 61,492 children were growing up on the streets of Accra as of 2011, 66 per cent migrant children, and 18 per cent urban dwellers.
She said the menace could be attributed to poverty, peer pressure, false perception of city life unreasonable parenting and the shirking of parents or guardians’ responsibilities.
She expressed worry that the children were not in school and the parents had not been bothered to enroll them in school by taking advantage of the free senior high school that the Government had introduced.
Mr Mohammed Rafiq Khan, Chief Child Protection, United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), said Children in street situations had been amongst the most marginalized children who experienced severe violations of their rights before and during their time on the streets.
He said they had been faced with multiple deprivations including lack of access to basic services, violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation, as well as vulnerabilities to alcohol and substance abuse which exacerbated when children migrated, either internally or across borders.
Mr Khan said, it was essential that all responses to address the needs of children in street situations would be firmly placed within a child rights-based approach in accordance with Committee on the Rights of The Child General Comment No.21 on Children in Street Situations (2017).
He said the five action areas to accelerate results for children including enhancing social protection, end poverty and prevent family-child protection, strengthening child protection policies, programmes and services would transform and accelerate sustainable solutions to the world’s biggest challenges.
GNA