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allAfrica.com: Ghana: Ghana Faced With Rising Numbers of Street Kids

Public Agenda (Accra) October 9, 2006 Posted to the web October 9, 2006 Irene Elorm Hatsu Accra

Children have been migrating from the rural areas to the cities for decades, but since the early 1990s, their numbers have been growing rapidly, and experts worry that Ghana’s population of street children will explode in the coming years.

According to UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, there are currently 30,000 children living on the streets of Ghana’s cities and towns. In Accra alone, there are 20,000, according to estimates by CAS, Catholic Action for Street Children, the largest NGO dealing with street children in the country.

Most street children in Ghana are between the ages of 10 and 18, though there are many who are far younger. Most have been on the streets for several months or years. They leave their villages in search of money to marry or go back to school, to escape the hopelessness and poverty of many rural areas, or to build a better future for themselves.

In the City of Accra many street children find their home on the streets. While several have come from the rural areas of Ghanaand surrounding countries, others have been born in the streets. The ratio of boys: girls is 50% each. These street children are all below the ageof 18 years and are not supported by anyone.The actual number is not known and it is also not important to know because every child who lives in the street should not be there.

In addition to the Street Children, many urban poor children can be found in the streets. These are children who find themselves in an urban area and have some kind of supportive home to go to, but they are on the street because of the lack of the basic necessities of life.

It is in line with this that the Director for Catholic Action for Street Children Mr. Jos Van Dinthir, has called on the government to fight the problem of street children by putting in place strategic plans and actions to help address the problem.

He appealed to government to formulate policies that seek the development and welfare of children especially street children. "The problem of street children has come to stay; government should recognize the real problem, study the problem and be serious in providing lasting solutions to the problem."

Speaking in an interview with the Public Agenda, he observed that every child has the right to sport and play no matter where the child lives. He said these activities make learning interesting and less stressful.

He disclosed that the Catholic Action for Children (CAC) has chosen to work mainly for the street children but it also supports street mothers who have their childrenin the streets.

In furtherance of this, CAC has provided a training center, where these street children are trained in employable skills. He said on the average between 20 and 40 children attend classes daily, different subjects, with varying levels of difficulty are taught, from reading and writing to mathematics, English and social skills. Children also learn drama and music at Hopeland Training Centre.

"Teaching at CAS is done by staffs that are not trained as teachers. The most important approach is first to have a good relationship with the child and teach them the basic necessities of life", he said.

The Chief Executive Officer of Right to Play, Johann Olav Koss said it is very important to ensure that street children, like other children are provided with the right environment to learn and play because it the right of every child to get education.

"Every child should have the same opportunity emotionally, physiologically and mentally in order to develop well", he told journalists on his visit to Accra. He said sports gives a healthy life style especially to growing children and also enables them set effective goals and work hard to achieve them.

"When I see children playing, happy and laughing, I get so fulfilled and get encouragement to work harder to make the world a better place for children". He said plans are under way to extend the Right To Play programmes to the north and other regions.

He further disclosed that children with disabilities have not been left out of the programmes, adding that specialized modules have been designed to enable such children take part in all Right To Play programmes.

Mr. Koss also said the Right To Play will be collaborating with the Ministry for Education, Sports and Science and also with the Football Association to be able to reach more children. 

Mr. Johann Olav Koss is one of the greatest winter athletes of all time. The four times Olympic Gold Medalist in speed skating made world headlines when he won three Gold Medals at the 1994 Lillehammer Games in the 1,500, 5,000 and 10, 000 meter events.

Right to Play is a registered international NGO in Ghana and has been implementing the Sport Health program since November 2001. The program started with Right to Play’s participation in the 5 in 1 immunization festival.

Right to Play Ghana collaborates with a number of government departments, international, national and local organisations to promote the use of sport as a tool for development thus creating positive change within the community.

This blog is an archive of articles about street children from the media and from blogs. I began to build this archive some time ago when I realized that many articles about street children go offline or become otherwise unavailable shortly after they are published. Even if they remain online it is difficult to find them all. I am compiling them here so that researchers and other interested parties can easily view related articles about street children. 

This archive was originally set up on blogspot.com as a collection of individual blogs where each country had its own archive of articles. After some time I realized that researchers interested in a specific subject such as glue-sniffing or prostitution would be unable to search all the country blogs simultaneously for relevant articles. Thus I am now moving all the articles over to this single blog and setting up separate categories for each continent and country. This will enable researchers to search for specific topics and find all stories relating to that topic, regardless of which country or date. This will also make it less cumbersome for me to post new articles.

If you are interested in street children in a specific country or continent, simply click the category link for that country on the right hand side of the page and you will see all the articles about street children in that particular country. Articles are presented in date order with the most recent article first.

Articles are also archived monthly by date of publication.

The articles collected here are only a sample of what is available online as reflected in searches in Google news, blogs and videos. I try to post every item I find but suspect that many are missed. Unfortunately, the only items included here are those published in English and I am sure there are many published in other languages that are not included.

Also, items included here are generally from popular sources rather than academic publications. An excellent bibiliography of scholarly materials is maintained by Joël Mermet, LL.M. - BIBLIOGRAPHY ON STREET CHILDREN 

Search facilities:

1. Onsite search: This will search specific categories or sub-categories (month/year, continent or country) and returns complete articles that contain the search terms within the category. For instance, if you wanted to research glue use amongst Philippines street children you would click on the Philippines streetkid news category on the right hand side of the page. This would take you to the Philippines streetkid news category pages. Scroll down to the search box and type in "glue" click "Search" and this site will return a page or pages containing all the Philippines Streetkid News articles that contain the word "glue," arranged by date,

2. Below the onsite search box is the Google search facility. The default search is within this entire site but you may also search the web. This search returns Google style snippets from each article on the site that contains the search text. It is not possible to search within specific categories using the Google search so a search for "glue" will return snippets from every article on the site that contains the word "glue." 

Visitors will please note that I claim no authorship nor any rights over any of the articles posted here, nor do I make any profit from their reproduction here from ads or commercial activities of any kind. These articles are posted here as a public service and to raise awareness of the plight of street children on our planet.

All articles are linked to their original sources and authors are credited wherever possible. Each article has two titles. The top title is a hyperlink to the article’s own page on this site. If you click it you will be able to see any comments other visitors have made on the post. The second title below is a link to the original source for the article.

Editing: With the exception of formatting changes sometimes necessary to remove advertisements I rarely change anything in the articles that are posted. A consistent exception to this practice is that whenever possible I make links to organizations that are mentioned in the article’s text so that visitors may easily visit those NGOs’ websites.

I hope visitors will find this archive useful. I welcome any comments or suggestions. 

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Jamghat- a million revolutions

So we decided to have a first hand feel of the condition of homeless people and specially kids on the streets of Delhi at night. Finally we thought of sleeping on Delhi roads for a night. While we were deciding on the date of sleep out a number of questions crossed our minds, like ‘can these people sleep here without taking drugs and suletion(solution)’ and then in the process finalized the date as 23rd of September 2006.

On 23rd before the sleep out we did a night walk which started at 7:00 p.m. from Old Delhi Railway Station. The four of us that is Amit, Vinay, Vinod and me(Kaivalya) were accompanied by John who is an intern from England and is doing a research project on street kids in Delhi and by Upamanyu who is student of Delhi University and a very dear friend of Jamghat.

From 7:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. we covered the the Purani Dilli area including Fatehpuri area of Chandni Chowk, Kashmere Gate, I.S.B.T. and Yamuna Bazar.

After the walk we got a very positive feedback from John who was now even more determined to work towards the problems of street kids in Delhi and then with good wishes left us behind. Then came the time to sleep out with the people on the streets and only the sky above us.

The place where we slept was a divider on the outer ring road near Yamuna Bazar. The reason why we selected this place was that it was prone to all kindsof dangers from from Police Harassment to Gundas to Accidents due to fast moving heavy vehicles at night.

We went through some crazy experiences at night. Once our sleep was broken by two big rats fighting near our toes and they scaring us rather than we scaring them. Sometimes drug addicts came and started keenly staring at us but they didn’t do anything and went away quietly. But the most scary incident was when a heavy truck almost ran over us it actually kissed our heads and went away.
In the middle of the night at around 2 we woke up because of the cold weather that night. All of us were shivering as we didn’t have any blanket or bed sheet to cover ourselves. But this forced us to think about the situation of other people on chilly winter nights of December and January. Then we got up and went to I.S.B.T. to have a cup of tea after which we went to another pavement which was stinking due to urine smell but when we found so many people already sleeping out there we thought that even we should try it out.
By this time were so tired that as soon as we laid down there we went to sleep for two hours. This gave us partial answers to some of our questions. We actually were able to empathize with people who do so much of physical work throughout the day and are therefore able to sleep in those dangerous conditions.
In the morning we did a feedback session in which each one of us in a couple of lines said what came straight from our hearts following are those statements:-

AMIT- Kabhi Paise nahi honge, ghar nahi hoga aur kam nahi hoga to in logon ki tarah mehnat karke sadak pe soke bhi zindagi ka saath nibha lenge par usool nahi bechenge.

VINAY- Yaar uth ke issue ke baare mein soch ke bhi nahi soch pa raha hoon ya log akhir yahaan har roz manage kaise karte hain.

VINOD- Ajeeb si khushi hai ki hum issue ko janane ke liye sadak pe utar aaye.

UPAMANYU- Maain Dilli mein 1.5 saal se akela hostel mein reh raha hoon par aaj tak kisi bhi tarah ka nasha nahi kiya but agar yahan 1 mahine bhi rahoonga to bure se bura nasha karne lagoonga.

KAIVALYA- Sharir se aam aadmi hone ki gandh aa rahi hai aur amiron ke chotepan pe gussa aa raha ki wo apne faayede ke alawa kuch nahi sochte but at the same time I feel very luck to have been brought up in a secure environment.

But till now a lot of questions disturb us and we seriously need to find answers to them so that we could actually WORK WITH KIDS RATHER THAN TRYING THE STEROETYPE WAY OF WORKING FOR THEM.

Also in the end we on behalf of Jamghat would like to invite more and more volunteers who could help us out in our efforts in any which way and work with us towards building a better environment for the street kids.

HAZAARON KHWAISHEIN AISI

Kaivalya Desai
Jamghat