Develop policies to create jobs in the North-To halt migration

Daily Graphic Pg. 11. Tues. Feb. 23/10

Story Rebecca Quaicoe-Duho

CO-AUTHORS of a book, ‘Independent migration of children’, have called on the government to develop programmes and policies that will create job opportunities in the northern part of the country to halt migration to the south.
They have also called on the government to address the root causes of ethnic conflicts exhaustively as a way of speeding up the development process of the country especially in the northern sector.
The book, written by Professor Stephen O. Kwankye, a senior lecturer at the Regional Institute for Population Studies (RIPS) at the University of Ghana, Legon, and Dr John K. Anarfi, Head of the Social Division at the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER), presents to policymakers and researchers insights into the current phenomenon of independent North-South migration of children especially young girls in the country.
Launched by the Deputy Minister for Women and Children’s Affairs (MOWAC), Hajia Hawawu Boya Gariba, in Accra, the authors examined the life of the young migrant in the city from the perspective of a mixture of socio-economic enhancement of lives of child migrants and the challenges they face.
They also show the various socio-economic and health perspectives of the phenomenon of child migration especially from the northern part of the country to the urban centres, including efforts at return and re-integration of the children back home.
The authors contribute to further research and feed into policy directions with regard to the positive and negative aspects of children as independent migrants and look at independent migration of children in the context of migration, globalisation and poverty.
Some of the recommendations made are a suggestion for a massive educational investment in the affected areas to make education more attractive, affordable and closer to people.
The authors also called on policymakers to make parents integral part of the educational drive through campaigns that educate them on the costs of sending their children to the south through migration.
They also called on the government to consider independent migration of children in migration policies to provide social protection for child migrants who engage in genuine businesses to earn income, as well as consider the establishment of accommodation to double as counselling and support centres for child migrants in the cities.
They further called on the government to intensify sexual and reproductive health educational campaigns targeting child migrants such as “kayayei” in the cities, adding that the Ministry of Women and Children’s Affairs (MOWAC) should develop a programme to follow up migrants who voluntarily returned with macro-finance schemes to facilitate their sustainable re-integration.
Launching the book, the deputy minister said children’s well-being and the future of the country would depend very much on the amount of investment made in their survival, growth and development.
She said if concerns of children were not mainstreamed into national policies, efforts to promote a sustainable development would not yield much efforts.
She said “a brighter future of our children will hinge on greater commitment from the government to draw, implement and monitor policies and initiatives that would promote the general care system in the country for children of especially school age”.
Delivering a keynote address, Professor Nelson Otto Addo said migration in the country had for a long time been noted to be a north-south one based on differences in spatial development.
He said with the northern half of Ghana being a relatively less developed region, it had continued to remain a pool of migrant labour for the cocoa and mining industries in the middle and southern belts of the country.
Prof. Addo, whose address was read by Prof. John Nelson, a former academic, said there was the need to put in place policies and interventions that sought to minimise the risks or costs of independent migration of children and to maximise the benefits.