Gender Ministry embarks on streetism exercise

The Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection, has set out a pilot project to take off children from the streets of Accra.

The ministry in collaboration with the Department of Social Development and the in Greater Accra Regional Police Command is pear heading the initiative.

The children would be provided with training in employable skills, placement in formal and informal schools as well as promoting good healthy living among them whilst those who would be able to trace their backgrounds, would be reintegrated into their communities to unite with their families.

The Department of Social Development formerly Social Welfare Department would later extend the project to other regions in an effort to curb the menace of streetism.

A combined team of the Police and Social Welfare Workers has started an engagement with the street children on some major streets in Accra, including the Airport City road, the Opeibia House intersections in order to remove them from the streets and provide them decent accommodation.

Ms Phyllis Emefa Senyo, Regional Director, Department of Social Development briefing the media during the “Streetism Relocation Exercise,” said the street children would undergo health screening.

They would also be offered psychological counselling, interviewed to know their background and personal needs, which would then form the basis for the necessary governmental interventions.

Ms Senyo explained that some of the children are on the street because they might have committed an offence in the house hence running away from punishment, while others are orphans and others are playing truancy.

Assistant Superintendent of Police Samuel Azugu, Second in Command, Original Operations, Accra who led the operation with his men expressed the commitment of the Police to work closely with the Department to provide conducive shelter for the street children.

He noted that the exercise is not to arrest the children but to provide them with decent shelter and train them for the future, adding: “The streets are not for habitation especially children.”

The street children who initially thought the Police and the Social Welfare Workers were out to arrest them, started running.

The Police however pursued them and convinced them that it was not an arrest but an exercise to provide them decent abode.

The children are temporary being housed at the Centre for Abused Children of the Department of Social Development, at Madina where they are being taken care of.

The exercise resulted in 34 minors, 11females and 23 males taken out from the streets on the first day of the exercise.

Streetism is a broad term used to encompass the desperate situation of children 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 along the streets.

The Children’s Act of 1998 (Act 560) defines a child as any person under the age of 18 years.

Section 18 stipulates that when a child needs care and protection and whose responsibility it is to provide services in relation to care and protection.

In recent times the number of children found loitering along the busy streets of Accra contrary to sections 17, 18, 19 of Act 560 has become a nuisance and of great concern to the authorities and Ghanaian society at large.

Children are helpless in such situations and subjected to all forms of abuse and exploitation.

Economic pressures faced by parents of these children often provide the situation of family disintegration leading to child neglect.