Children are vulnerable and as such should be protected against all forms of abuses and violence wherever they are.
The police, schools, family and all other institutions have the responsibility to protect children from all forms of abuses including physical, emotional, sexual and neglect.
In the school where they spend most of their time, it is important that child protection is given the priority to ensure the safety of children.
It is against this background that a social development company, Participatory Development Associates (PDA), organised a workshop with the objective to make participants to understand how children’s safety and protection were ensured in schools through both government and private sector initiatives.
The workshop which was in collaboration with the Department of Children at the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection was on the theme ‘Protecting the Ghanaian schoolchild: Improving effective partnerships between state and non-state actors’.
The issues
Addressing participants, a Deputy Minister for Gender, Children and Social Protection, Ms Freda Prempah, said in Ghana the protection and development of schoolchildren lay greatly with school authorities.
That, she said, was because schoolchildren spent most of their active hours in school thus whatever they learnt were largely influenced by their teachers.
“Children in school faced a lot of child protection issues such as bullying, exposure to harmful materials, rape, sanitation issues, mode of discipline, among others,” she said.
To buttress this point, Ms Prempah said a study conducted by the Department of Children on the situational analysis of children in Ghana recently revealed that 77 per cent of children’s source of knowledge on their rights were their teachers.
“The influence of teachers on our children can never be underestimated; it is therefore, prudent we build the capacity of school authorities on child right promotion and protection issues,” she noted.
Stakeholders role
In order to promote and protect the right of the Ghanaian child, she pointed out that stakeholders needed to foster strong partnership and create robust collaboration between state and non-state actors.
That, she said may include designing and implementing sensitisation programmes, formation of child rights clubs, provision of child-friendly version of policies and strategic interventions which seek to promote child protection in our schools.
Although Ghana has made some efforts in child protection through various collaborations and partnerships, the Deputy Minister said more needed to be done to strengthen sensitisation of children on their rights and the reporting channels in situations when their rights were being abused.
“Stakeholders in education should therefore be committed to the implementation of laws and policies which protect the rights of schoolchildren to provide a safer and protective learning environment for everyone.
As parents and guardians, we also ought to pay keen attention to the development of our children and wards,” she urged.
Objective
The Managing Director of PDA, Mr Edem Agbe, said the workshop served as an avenue to share among practitioners and state actors, emerging knowledge and evidence in the child protection space with the objective of informing policy formulation and implementation.
He said many organisations including government agencies were doing a lot to enhance the protection and welfare of children in schools but very little was known about such activities.
