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Compassion provides shoes for children to promote school attendance

The Country Director of Compassion International Ghana, Padmore Baffour Agyapong, assisting a child to put on his new shoes.Compassion International Ghana, a Christian child-related NGO, has distributed 12,906 pairs of shoes to needy children in the Greater Accra, Central, Eastern and Volta regions.

The shoes, worth US$51,624, were bought from a local manufacturer with funds provided by Toms Shoes, a US-based shoe manufacturing company.

The distribution of the shoes is a pilot intervention of Compassion International Ghana’s Shoe Purchase and Distribution Programme (SPDP) which ensures that children do not drop out of school for lack of shoes.

The programme targets children in deprived communities where Compassion International Ghana currently operates.

It is the hope of the NGO that by wearing shoes to school, the children will avoid contracting soil-borne infections, injuries, snake bites, etc.

Distributing some of the shoes to children of the Church of Pentecost Child Development Centre at Oyarifa, the Country Director of Compassion International Ghana, Mr Padmore Baffour Agyapong, noted that the distribution of shoes to the children would significantly improve their health and reduce absenteeism in school.

“You will not believe it, but some children, even in the Greater Accra Region, still go to school barefooted or in some sandals that demean them. And some do not go to school because they lack any kind of footwear. We, therefore, hope that the shoes will help improve school attendance as part of our contribution to attaining the Millennium Development Goal 2, which aims at achieving universal primary education,” he said.

He said the SPDP intervention would be repeated as and when Toms Shoes approved new proposals to ensure that the children were not left midway after wearing shoes for some time.

Mr. Agyapong said last year the NGO received a donation of 29,640 shoes of various sizes from Toms Shoes, which it distributed together with Christian Outreach Fellowship, a missionary group promoting child development in the Northern Region.   

According to the Country Director, this year too, Toms Shoes had donated another container of 30,720 shoes to be distributed to the same children who benefited from last year’s consignment.

He said that formed part of Toms Shoes’ policy to provide shoes for the same children for a number of years in order to track their school attendance.

By Rosemary Ardayfio/Ghana

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