‘Highlight issues affecting welfare of children’
Tje Chief of Amakom in Kumasi, Nana Adu Mensah Asare, has called on Ghanaians, especially policy makers and the media, to help highlight issues affecting the welfare of children.
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He explained that if Ghanaians continued to devote more attention to issues that divided the country along political party lines and other unproductive issues at the expense of critical matters bordering on the prosperity and the growth of children, the country would be doomed in the near future.
Nana Mensah Asare was speaking in Kumasi at this year’s celebration of “World Day Against Child Labour” organised by the Kumasi Metropolitan Assembly (KMA), in collaboration with other stakeholders, on the welfare of children.
Theme
The theme for this year’s celebration is “No to Child Labour, Yes to Quality Education”. Earlier in the day, some of the schoolchildren marched through some of the streets in Amakom holding placards to create awareness of the problem of child labour.
Some of the placards read, “Save our Children”, “Mmofra yi ye daakye”, “Send Your Girl-Child to School”, “Stop Child Trafficking”, “Children are suffering in the Market” and “Avoid Discrimination”.
The term “child labour” is often defined as work that deprives children of their childhood, their potential and their dignity, which is harmful to physical and mental development.
It refers to work that is mentally, physically, socially or morally dangerous and harmful to children and interferes with their schooling by depriving them of the opportunity to attend school, obliging them to leave school prematurely; or requiring them to attempt to combine school attendance with excessively long and heavy work.
Nana Mensah Asare urged policy makers, parents, teachers and traditional rulers not to see the day as a routine event, but to use the occasion to work strenuously to ensure that the safety, security and the advancement of the welfare of children was made a daily affair.
Quoting the Children’s Act 560 of 1998, the Municipal Director of the Social Welfare Department, Madam Susana Sackey, said by law, children under the age of 18 were entitled to the right to life, shelter, education, protection, among others.
She said parents, family members and the entire society must strive to cater for the welfare of the children to enable them to realise their God-given talents to be able to contribute to the country’s development.
She explained that there was clear difference between child labour and socialisation, noting that no law was against socialisation, which meant that children could undertake household chores and support their families, provided such help would not deprive them of their education and also impact negatively on their health.
