14 Rescued street children reunited with families

The Department of Social Welfare (DSW) in the Greater Accra Region has reunited 14 of the 34 children they rescued from the street a fortnight ago with their families.

This followed the successful completion of an initial screening and assessment of the specific needs and peculiar circumstances that took the children to the streets.

In a telephone interview with the Daily Graphic yesterday, the Greater Accra Director of DSW, Mrs Phyllis Emefa Senyo, said 12 more street children had voluntarily reported to the Social Welfare facility at the La Nkwantanang Municipality and were being taken care of.

Initial assessment

She said the department had invited the parents of some of the children for fruitful discussions on how to keep the children off the streets.

According to her, it came out from the interactions that some of the children came from broken homes and others were victims of domestic violence.

“Even after we had fruitful discussions with the parent of some of the children, they refused to follow their parents home, so they are still with us at the DSW facility,” she said.

LEAP Support

She said the Social Welfare outfit had plans to hold discussions with the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection (MGCSP) to explore the possibility of enrolling some of the children and their parents in the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) programme 

 “For some of the children, we realised that even though their parents were alive, they could simply not provide basic needs for the children. In some cases, the children were the breadwinners of the family. Such children need some social intervention,” she explained.

Mrs Senyo also said the DSW had put in place a mechanism to support the children who would be sent back to school after they had been provided with educational materials and some basic needs.

Background

Thirty-four children were rescued from some streets in Accra in a joint operation by the Department of Social Welfare (DSW) and the Accra Regional Police Command on May 16, 2016.

The children, comprising 23 males and 11 females, were taken off the streets in the Airport and Accra Mall areas, where most of them slept in the open, and taken to the DSW facility at Madina in the La Nkwantanang Municipal Assembly where they were housed, pending initial assessment of their situation.

The exercise, as explained by Mrs Senyo, formed part of a strategy by the Gender Ministry to take children off the street, in line with international requirements.