"Keep us in school and not on farms" Northern children tell parents

Yendi (N/R), June 18, GNA - School children in the Northern Region have pleaded with their parents to allow them to be in school rather than withdrawing them for farming activities, which draws back their development. The children indicated that their future remained bleak without formal education, and appealed to parents to understand that education was the modern tool for success, which would enable them to reciprocate parents' investments. The children said this on Tuesday in Yendi through drama, to mark the International Day of the African Child, an occasion marked every year in remembrance of children who were massacred in SOWETO in South Africa when they gathered to press home for better living conditions. The Christian Children's Fund of Canada (CCFC), an international NGO and its local partners organized the programme meant to let children talk to parents through drama, to ensure that some parents reversed their negative attitude towards children and to enrol them in formal schools.

CCFC is a child centred international development organization and a member of ChildFund Alliance, whose main purpose is to show compassion, love and caring to children, by offering them with the needed attention and assistance to grow. School children from the Yendi Municipality, Gushiegu, Saboba and Nanumba Districts' Area Child Development Projects under CCFC, staged different drama that concerned their future, and appealed for ways to prevent their peers from going to practice Kayayee in major cities for menial incomes. The plays the children staged depicted the dehumanizing nature in which some northern fathers treated and discriminated against their children especially the girl-child, when issue of education came up. The plays suggested ways of making the world friendly for children.

Madam Sanatu Nantogmah, Country Director of CCFC addressing the children after the skits exhibited by the children, called on parents to invest heavily in their children's education to ensure that the children did not go wayward.

She said the CCFC was concerned about children's welfare no matter their religious backgrounds, and that her outfit would continue to assist children and other vulnerable groups in society. She said children in Africa were facing a lot of challenges because of poverty, disease, conflicts and other social exclusions and stressed the need for all to extend a hand of friendship to children, for them to realize their dreams.

Mr. Mahama Adam Huudu Walvis, Yendi Municipal Chief Executive (MCE), said children in the Northern Region continue to face societal discrimination and that some traditional practices and norms were denying children of their statutory entitlements in terms of feeding, clothing, shelter, education and inheritance.

Mr. Walvis stressed the importance for all to listen to children to ensure that their rights were safe guarded to enhance their development. He advised parents to allow children to take part in some decisions at home that concerned them to ensure that their dreams materialized. He said the Yendi District Municipal Assembly would continue to implement projects and programmes that would promote the interest of children and appealed to all to support in any way that would help the child to grow.