Invest in vulnerable communities to end child labour - Child rights group urges govt
The President of Challenging Heights, a Winneba-based child rights organisation, Mr James Kofi Annan, has called on the government to make critical investments in vulnerable communities in a bid to tackle the menace of child labour.
According to him, many parents in such communities were poor due to inadequate job opportunities for them, hence their inability to provide the basic needs of their children which invariably pushed such children into child labour.
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He said “if parents in vulnerable communities are provided with the needed employment opportunities or employable skills to be able to earn decent wages and salaries, they will be in a better position to take proper care of the children”.
Child Labour Day
Mr Annan was speaking at a durbar organised by the NGO to commemorate this year’s World Day against Child Labour at Gomoa Akyease in the Gomoa Central District in the Central Region.
The World Day against Child Labour is held annually on June 12. It is an international day to raise awareness and prompt action to stop child labour in all its forms.
The International Labour Organisation (ILO) launched the day in 2002, which focused attention on the prevalence of child labour throughout the world and the action and efforts essential to eliminating it.
Mr Annan noted that child labour was prevalent in some communities due to poverty, and that if the needed opportunities were provided to engage them in income generating activities, it would prevent them from allowing their children to engage in hazardous work.
“I can tell you that if parents are self-sufficient, they will not give out their children to relations or others to go and live with them or sometimes sell them to middlemen who often exploit them by engaging in work beyond their strength” he said.
Improving local economy
Mr Annan noted that a critical thing the government and other stakeholders could do was to introduce policies and programmes capable of boosting the local economies so that people in vulnerable communities could engage in profitable ventures to better their lives.
For instance, he noted, due to scramble for developments and settlements, many farmers had lost their farmlands which were their source of livelihood to such a phenomenon which had made it very difficult for such people to take care of themselves and their children.
He stressed “children whose parents are confronted with such a situation are often forced onto the streets to engage in all forms of work although hazardous to be able to earn some income to support the family”.
Commenting on fishing communities, where child labour is prevalent, he said the government, through the Ministry of Fisheries and Aquaculture Development, could create fish markets in such areas to improve the local economy to improve the living conditions of the people.
He said in order to win the fight against child labour, the government must deliberatively come up with aggressive policy interventions and measures that would revamp the local economies for the benefit of the people.
Change attitude
He further advised parents to allow their children to go school and not push them onto the streets to work, stressing “parents must change their attitude and ensure that children are enrolled into school to acquire the needed education to have a better future.
He said children had a lot of potential in them and that through education they would be able to unearth such talents to fit into the society and to contribute to the growth of the country.
For his part, the Programme Head, Child’s Rights Promotion and Protection at the Department of Social Welfare in the Central Region, Mr Daniel Wallace Akyeampong, advised parents against allowing their children to stay with other people since such children were often forced into child labour.
He further entreated the children not to allow themselves to be carried away by what they saw around them since societal pressures had the tendency to destroy their future if they fell prey to them.
