Train children to be assertive, independent

Daily Graphic, pg. 11 Oct. 18/08

Story Rebecca Quaicoe Duho, Dodowa

The Greater Accra Regional Director of the Department of Children, Mr Peter Akyea, has called on parents and guardians to train their children and wards properly to make them assertive and independent in future.
Making a presentation on “The Effects of Conflict on Children, the Family and the Community”, he said children tended to lose their childhood whenever there was a conflict situation, and that, according to him affected them psychologically and emotionally.
He added that during conflict situations, the routine life of children was disrupted as a result of displacement, destruction, death and separation from their parents and families, and this left them to perform unsafe and unpleasant tasks for survival.
Mr Akyea was speaking at a day’s workshop which was organised by the Department of Children under the Ministry of Women and Children’s Affairs (MOWAC) at Dodowa in the Greater Accra Region.
The workshop, which was sponsored by the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF), was the fifth in a series of similar programmes that had been held in the Volta, Upper East, West and the Northern regions. It brought together representatives from non-governmental organisations (NGO’s), law enforcement agencies, social workers, traditional rulers and child educators.
He called on all to see child protection around the key area of child survival, development, protection and participation.
Mr Akyea said the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) offered the highest standards of protection and assistance for children, and that various articles of the Convention dealt with the best interest of the child under name and nationality, preservation of identity, separation from parents and family reunion.
Some of the participants expressed concern about the attitude of some parents who took undue advantage of the operation of orphanages in their communities and dumped their children there under the pretext that they were poor, and therefore could not take care of them.
They said although orphanages were meant to cater for children who had lost either one or both parents and did not have anybody in the extended family to take care of them, some mothers abandoned their children to be fed and clothed at such facilities, a situation which participants agreed was hampering the traditional way of bringing up children in the African society, and also destroying the family system in the country.
A social worker, Ms Patricia Wilkins, Executive Director of Basics International, an NGO, called on the Department of Social Welfare to critically examine the background of people who applied for permits to establish orphanages in the country.
A representative from the Greater Accra Regional Office of the Department of Social Welfare, Mr Leonard Agbley, said to ensure that orphanages in the country adhered to proper procedures of sheltering children the department was currently controlling the establishment of such institutions in the country.
He explained that managers of orphanages needed to have permits from the department before they could handle abandoned children in their institutions, adding that they would have to go through procedures such as notifying the police or a social welfare regional office of their plans to undertake such projects.
The Chairman of the Greater Accra Regional Multi-sectoral Committee on Child Protection (MCCP), Mrs Susanna Mahama, in a welcome address said conflict in homes and society presented situations where children and their mothers ended up suffering the consequence of such situations.