A total of 15,439 children have benefited from two Right To Play (RTP) Ghana initiatives aimed at improving the quality of education, strengthening child protection and tackling child labour and trafficking in eight districts across the Ashanti, Ahafo, Volta and Oti regions.
The beneficiaries comprise 11,119 children under the My Life, My Rights (MLMR) project and 4,320 under the My Life, My Future (MLMF) project.
Speaking at a national stakeholder engagement in Accra yesterday, the Head of Office of RTP Ghana, Harrison Akubor, said the initiatives were designed to strengthen community capacity to prevent and respond to child labour and trafficking through education, child protection and economic empowerment.
He said children were important assets to community development and required sustained investment in their education, protection and well-being.
Mr Akubor said livelihood empowerment was critical because economically strengthened families were better positioned to meet their children’s basic needs and reduce circumstances that pushed them into exploitative labour.
He said community members had benefited from Village Savings and Loans Associations (VSLAs), enabling some of them to access loans to support their livelihoods and their children’s education.
He explained that poverty was a major driver of child labour in cocoa-growing communities, noting that families struggling to meet their basic needs sometimes relied on children to support farming activities.
The Project Manager of MLMR, Julius Kwami Tsatsu, said girls constituted 48 per cent of the 11,119 direct child beneficiaries, while the project had also reached 412 teachers, 33 per cent of whom were female.
Mr Tsatsu said the livelihood component was, therefore, helping women and men become economically self-reliant, enabling parents to keep their children in school and hire adult labour for farm activities.
He added that long distances between remote settlements and main communities were a major challenge affecting school attendance among rescued children.
He also identified inadequate teaching personnel as a challenge, saying some schools operated multi-grade systems, with one teacher sometimes handling two or three classes.
The Acting Project Manager for MLMF, Josephine Baffoe, said children in the Volta and Oti regions were increasingly becoming advocates for their rights, with about 90 per cent demonstrating improved capacity to speak up and seek protection against exploitative child labour.
She said the MLMF project had reached 4,320 children directly out of a target of 4,800, while targeting an additional 7,700 children indirectly, 190 teachers and education directors, and 224 community and municipal child protection committee members.
Ms Baffoe said child clubs were helping children distinguish between child labour and appropriate child work, identify harmful activities and report concerns through established child protection and referral systems.
BY PRINCE ADDO FRIMPONG
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