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Rehabilitation centre for street children inaugurated
A one-million cedi two-storey rehabilitation centre with a dormitory block attached to cater for street children in the New Juaben South Municipality of the Eastern Region has been inaugurated.
The facility, which was funded by the District Assemblies Common Fund (DACF), can accommodate about 500 children.
The first of its kind in the Eastern Region, the facility will offer vocational training such as sewing, carpentry, hairdressing, weaving, among others, for the inmates.
At a short ceremony to commission the facility at Nyamekrom, a suburb of Koforidua, the Municipal Chief Executive (MCE) for New Juaben South, Isaac Appaw-Gyasi, said the assembly's biggest worry was how to accommodate street children and also train them in various vocations such as sewing, carpentry and hairdressing.
Assembly burden
According to him, although it was the responsibility of parents to cater for their children, it had become a burden on the assembly to ensure that such unfortunate children were properly accommodated and given skills training to enable them to earn a living and at the same time become useful citizens.
Take good care
The centre, Mr Appaw-Gyasi indicated, would be manned by the Social Welfare Department of the assembly to take good care of the children and asked the chiefs and people in the community to take good care of the facilities, adding that maintenance culture had been a problem in many communities and that should not be the case at Nyamekrom.
The Chief of Nyamekrom, Nana Odame Affum, was grateful to the assembly for putting up the centre to offer vocational training for the street children in the municipality.
He said such a venture would take away street children from the streets which had been his biggest challenge.
Projects
Earlier, Mr Appaw-Gyasi inaugurated other five projects in different parts of the municipality.
Those projects comprise a GH¢170,000 two-unit classroom block for the Sarkodie M/A Memorial Basic School at Nsukwo, a two-unit Kindergarten classroom block at Ada Kyeremanteng costing GH¢300,000, a GH¢1 million 40-lockable stores for the Zongo Market and a meat shop also at the Zongo Market financed by the Chairman of the Koforidua Butchers Association, Alhaji Yakubu.
At the various sites, the MCE appealed to the beneficiaries of the facilities to use them to serve the purpose for which they had been constructed or rehabilitated.