By Bertha Badu-Agyei
Koforidua, Sept 27, GNA – The Ghanaians Against Child Abuse (GACA), a social drive campaign is set to review it’s messages and contents to revitalise the new phase of the campaign.
The move is to address existing gaps and challenges identified by evaluation after five years of the GACA implementation to amplify voices of religious and traditional leaders as a key component of the campaign.
The GACA is a national behaviour change campaign for the protection of children and is a joint programme by the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection, Ministry of local government and rural development, Education ministry as well as key development partners with support from UNICEF.
The GACA campaign addressed various child protection issues with strong focus on adolescents such as child sexual abuse, child trafficking, bullying and corporal punishments amongst others.
Ms Joyce Odame, a child protection officer at UNICEF at a two-day co-creation workshop in Koforidua noted that GACA had a widespread reach in communities across Ghana with the campaign potentially reaching over 4,000 communities in 100 districts in all 16 regions in the last five years.
Survey results also indicated that reactions to the campaign were largely positive almost 90 per cent of respondents said they had engaged in the campaign and learned something new as a result.
“However there have been slower rate of improvement in attitudes towards corporal punishments, over 94 per cent of children still experience violent discipline” she noted.
Again, there has been some skepticisms and negative feedback concerning some of the GACA messages and TV adverts intended to promote non-violent discipline of children.
Hence, the need to review and create new messages to strengthen the campaign to enforce positive behavior and discourage negative practices in the interest of child protection.
Participants at the workshop were drawn from the GACA Technical Working Group, selected representatives from traditional and religious groupd, NGOs linked to the thematic areas of the campaign and young people to deliberate on the gaps and make inputs for the review.
GNA