Journalists’ interest in child abuse cases to be intensified
The Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection and the World Vision, Ghana, are discussing ways to get media practitioners to develop interest in reporting on child abuse cases.
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While the ministry has organised training sessions to equip journalists with knowledge to report on such issues and other related matters, the World Vision Ghana is looking beyond training to awarding journalists.
It has already held discussions with the Ghana Journalists Association (GJA) to sponsor an award in that direction during the association’s annual award ceremony.
The Deputy Minister of Gender, Children and Social Protection, Mrs Della Sowah, and National Director, World Vision Ghana, Mr Hubert D. Charles, met at the ministry to synchronise their activities in that direction.
Effort of the ministry
The Chief Director of the ministry, Mr Kwesi Armo-Himbson, briefed the Director of the World Vision on what the ministry was doing to reduce or eliminate the incidents of kayayei, teenage pregnancy, early child marriage and the witch camps in northern Ghana.
With regards to curbing kayayei, which is the movement of young ladies from the northern regions to the southern part of the country for greener pastures, Mr Armo-Himbson said the ministry was tracing the source where the young girls were moving from to the cities so that it could put in place some social interventions to prevent them from continuing to move to the cities.
He said if the ministry was able to trace and locate the families from which the girls were coming from, and it was established that they were from extremely poor families, the ministry could include them in its Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) programme, which is a cash transfer to the vulnerable in society.
“The idea is to encourage them to remain in their communities, while the ministry supports them with the programme. The ministry hopes that this will reduce the rural-urban drift among these girls,” he explained.
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Training for media
Mrs Sowah was happy that World Vision was working towards courting the media to report accurately on child abuse issues.
She said the ministry had organised training sessions for the media and believed that further training for media practitioners was not a bad idea.
On interventions to end child pregnancy, the minister said the problem was nationwide, and focusing on one particular part of the country might be to the disadvantage of the rest.
Zero tolerance
She said the intention of the ministry was to achieve zero tolerance for child pregnancy; a position the World Vision Ghana boss was elated about, adding that such a target was achievable.
Mr Charles called for collaboration in tackling issues such as birth registration, where his outfit was committed to providing transportation to rural areas.