Media engagement on child labour trafficking ends

A media practitioner, Desmond Tinana, has called for regular sensitisation and adequate resources to tackle the issues of child labour in the country. 

That, he said, was to enable the media to bring such issues of child labour and trafficking to the authorities for their elimination.

This came to light during a media engagement workshop at Dambai in the Oti Region last Friday, which urged journalists to highlight the issues of child labour and trafficking prevalent in the cocoa and fishing industries. 

Fight

The fight against child labour was being undertaken by Right To Play International, an NGO, in collaboration with Partners in Community Development Programme (PACODEP) and Alliance for Community Resilience and Development (ACRAD).

It is a three-year European Union-funded project dubbed “My Future My Future” that is being undertaken across the Oti and Volta regions to strengthen child protection systems and reduce child labour.

According to Mr Tinana, that would strengthen the collaboration with the media to enable them to carry out the advocacy of messages that would pre-empt the passing of legislation to bring an end to child labour issues in the country.  

Addressing the participants, the Director of PACODEP, George Achibra, noted that children died daily in the fishing industry because they were made to dive into the rivers to free nets that were cast into the waters.

He, therefore, called on the media to carry out the stories to the public, who would thus wake up to the need to keep their children at home. 

View

Mr Achibra was of the view that the media was capable of providing the best means to fight the issue of child labour and, as such, protect the children.

He called for the sensitisation and resourcing of journalists to make them mobile and get to places where they could see what was happening to children.

To mitigate that, Mr Achibra said they had rescued children in hazardous jobs and sent them back to school, which had gone unnoticed by the public.

As such, he expressed the wish that the media would carry out the advocacy through their various channels to assist them in their quest to put an end to the canker.

The Project Manager of My Rights My Future, Bagonluri Kibuka, said the workshop was to open for all to see what was happening to the children so that such issues would be taken seriously.

He said the issues were also much pronounced in the cocoa farms in the Volta Region and Kpando, Kadjebi, Krachi East and West in the Oti Region.

Mr Bagonluri Kibuka said they had undertaken a lot of advocacy, but their efforts had not been brought to the notice of the public.

That, he said, was the reason for the need to sensitise the media to join in the crusade since child labour is illegal.

Mr Bagonluri Kibuka agreed that poverty could be a reason why children were forced to engage in such hazardous work.