Minister calls for new strategies in child care

Nana Oye Lithur, Minister of Gender, Children and Social Protection, has called for new strategies to handle issues on early childhood care and development that would yield desirable results.

She said 10 years of the existence of the National Early Childhood Care and Development Committee (NECC) was enough to called for stock taking.

Nana Oye Lithur, who said this when she inaugurated an 18-member reconstituted NECC in Accra, tasked the members to come out with Early Childhood Care and Development standards.

She urged them to champion the course of Early Childhood Care and Development (ECCD) to scale up the implementation of the policy.

Members have been tasked with responsibilities to, among other things, establish and operationalise a national programme for research, monitoring and evaluation of ECCD, propose amendment to the policy, make provision for and mobilise resources for ECCD programme within the budget and advise the Ministry on such issues.

They are also to ensure the co-ordination of efforts among those providing ECCD services, especially in the training of care-givers and facilitate the synchronization of relevant aspects of the policy into existing sector policies and programmes upon adoption.

Nana Oye Lithur said since the formulation of the ECCD Policy, the agenda had been reformed to meet new global approaches of formulating comprehensive policies and programmes for children from birth to eight years, including their parents and care-givers.

She said the new approach was aimed at promoting and protecting the rights of young children to develop their full cognitive, emotional, social and physical potentials.

She said the ECCD Policy has progressively received recognition on national and international levels such that it had become a model for other countries, example Nigeria, to learn the best practices to advance the course of ECCD in their countries.

Nana Oye Lithur disclosed in an interview with the GNA that Ghana was ratifying the Hague Convention to enable her to create adoption regulation for the country.

She said Ghana would add a governance structure, a data base on adoption, and strengthen the Social Welfare Department to regularise the adoption procedures.

She said the need to regularise stemmed from the fact that people were using different reasons to adopt children.

Mrs Rabiana Azara Amandi, the Director, Pre-Tertiary Education, Ministry of Education, and a member of the committee, pledged that the committee would work hard to ensure that the Ministry achieved its objectives.