Afrikids scales up interventions to cover more areas in UE

Afrikids-Ghana, a Non-Governmental Organization operating in the Upper East Region, has re-strategized its interventions to expand its outreach programmes to all the 13 districts of the Upper East Region.

From a coverage of five districts in the region and one district in the Northern Region, in the past 10 years, the new strategic direction of Afrikids is to prioritize on education, child protection and health with over 31 projects that will extend to Upper West and Northern regions.

Mr Nickolas Kumah, the Country Director of Afrikids Ghana, said child protection is critical to the development of any nation and ensuring the rights of all children is key to contributing to national development.

Mr Kumah, speaking in an interview with the Ghana News Agency at Pusunamongo in the Talensi District, after a dissemination workshop on the new strategic plans, said scaling up the interventions of the NGO would involve focusing on activities to deepen beneficiary support in area of health, child protection and education.

Under education, the Country Director said Afrikids planned not only to work on increasing child enrolment in schools but to ensure that such children stayed and completed their basic education.

As pacesetters in the eradication of the Spirit Child Phenomenon (SCP) in the Upper East Region, Mr Kumah said lessons learnt over the years would inform the new strategies to ensure quality and the sustainability of programmes with emphasis on working with traditional authorities and communities to eradicate practices that affect the development of children.

He urged stakeholders who are technocrats to the success of the implementation of the programmes, to lead the process whilst Afrikids played the facilitating role and hoped that stakeholders in health, education and child protection will help ensure the success of the interventions.

Mr Kumah said the communities were a critical driving force to the success of projects and urged the people to own the programmes to achieve maximum impact.

He said the new strategy would also afford the programme staff to direct their energies on the activities which will deepen their knowledge and help them to be conversant with their specialized roles expected of them.

Mr David Pwalua, the Director of Programmes, Afrikids, in an earlier presentation, said the NGO, in the previous interventions supported 3,200 children in Junior High school, 1,420 in Senior High Schools, 530 at the tertiary level and also 9,445 out of school children, 1,008 of them given access to vocational training.

He said from the inception of the programme in 2007, the health programmes unit has paid medical bills of 21 children in critical health conditions and helped them to roll onto the NHIS.

The workshop was attended by traditional rulers, District Education Directors, District Directors of Department of social welfare, Coordinating directors and NCCE and the District Directors of the Ghana Health Service.