Caretaker Minister for Gender, Children and Social Protection, Mrs Cecilia Abena Dapaah, has made a startling revelation that approximately 62,000 children are growing up on the streets of Accra.
She stated that 66% of these children are migrant children and 18% urban dwellers among other smaller groups.
This, she said, was contained in a 2011 finding of a census on street children in the Greater Accra Region, which was subsequently confirmed by the Department of Social Welfare n in 2014 and questioned what the situation could be today.
She explained that the causes of the street menace are mostly attributable to poverty, peer pressure, false perception of city life, attraction to the glittering lights glitz of the city and unreasonable parenting and neglect of guardian and parenting responsibilities and the disturbances in the ECOWAS sub-region.
Mrs. Cecilia Dapaah, also the substantive Minister for Sanitation and Water Resources made the disclosure on Thursday 28th October, 2021 at a Consultation and Validation Workshop on street-connected children in Accra.
She also disclosed that in 2017 the Gender Ministry identified 4,853 street peasants who include children with a total of 4,165 eligible to get formal education.
Less than 200, she said, have been rescued and reunited with their families and are in school as of May 2021.
National Security, she said, through a monitoring exercise also identified hotspots of children and families totalling about 2,000 on the streets of Accra, and Kumasi but mostly made up of foreign nationals.
She lamented that hardly a day passes by today without seeing children on the streets, sometimes with their parents, at times with the parents hiding behind trees and other structures or they are alone.
“Such children include those who have been subjected to abuse, such as severe beating at home and starvation in their homes and have resorted to finding solace on the streets.”
“Some even go without knowing where they are and without adequate shelter so they are left to the vagaries of the weather,” she stated.
According to her, there have been attempts in the past to address streetism without success and stressed that the statistics indicate the situation still persists and getting worse.
The Ministry, she said, needs the support of all stakeholders to work out a sustainable solution to the problem.
She urged stakeholders at the workshop to proffer solutions for the phenomenon and noted that the government cannot succeed alone but needs the contribution of all including parents of these children.
