Gender Ministry scales up effort to take children off streets
The Gender, Children and Social Protection Ministry has scaled up efforts to take more children off the streets of Kumasi, the nation’s second largest city.
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This involves the combination of counseling and the opportunity for vocational training.
The Ashanti Regional Director of the Department of Children, Mr Stephen Ofosu Daffour, said every effort would be made to roll back the disturbing trend of streetism.
He was speaking at a meeting of the regional child protection committee held in Kumasi.
Many of these homeless young people, he noted, had been forced to live on the streets because of broken marriages and parental irresponsibility.
He said it was heartbreaking, “seeing children sleep under the Asafo Interchange and in the open at the Adum Central Business District and Bantama.”
“This, certainly cannot be allowed to continue and we are determined to change things – assist and provide these young people with some protection,” he noted.
Mr Daffour said they were deepening the conversation with parents - visiting the communities to get everybody to live up to their responsibility to children.
He identified economic empowerment and education as the way forward and appealed to the metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies to do more to help create jobs.
He also encouraged other stakeholders, including non-governmental organisations, to focus on helping to lift people out of poverty. — GNA