GNAT holds symposium on Child Labour

Mrs Dorcas Awusi-Ansah, Deputy Director, Girls Education Unit, Ministry of Education, on Thursday, called for parental support to government’s effort in ensuring equal access and opportunity to girl-child education in Ghana.

    She said while government strived to put in place attractive policies and programmes to increase school enrolment for all children, parents must also complement the effort by encouraging their girl-child and creating favourable learning conditions for them, especially at home so that they could academically excel.

      Mrs Awusi-Ansah, who was addressing a symposium on child labour, as a prelude to the celebrations of the World Day Against Child Labour, which falls on Friday June 12, said government may ratify several conventions and put in place policies and programmes to eliminate all forms of abuses against children but needed both parental and public support to make such programmes effective.

       The symposium on the theme: "Give Girls a Chance: End Child Labour," was to highlight and discuss topics including the impact and challenges of ten years of child labour intervention in Ghana, opportunities and challenges in the implementation of National Policy on Girl Child Education and how child labour had impacted on the education of the girl child.

       Mrs Awusi-Ansah said 10 years of child labour interventions in Ghana had recorded various improvements and numerous challenges that needed attention in order to ensuring the attainment of the Millennium Development Goal (2).
    This called for all children to complete a full course of primary education by 2015 with goal (3) targeting the elimination of gender disparities both in primary and secondary education.

       She said to achieve the objectives, government with the support of the development partners, agencies, international and local non-governmental organisations, had put in place activities such as the Free Compulsory Universal Basic Education (FCUBE), the Capitation Grant and the Ghana School Feeding Programme that sought to take away all direct cost of education as well as ensure that children were fed to improve academic performance.
      Mrs Awusi-Ansah said the result had been tremendous as far as enrolment was concerned with the children of school going age, especially girls that had enrolled since the year 2005 and 2006.

        She said the opportunities created by the implementation of activities under those policies had been enormous and there was the tendency to assume that there would be no children of school going age who were out of school.  
        Mrs Awusi-Ansah said a lot of advocacy work had been done at the community level to educate both parents and guardians on the benefits of girl child education, yet once girls are in school their progress were often hampered by teacher attitudes, teaching methods and gender insensitive teaching methods that reinforced the negative gender stereotypes.

         She said the school-based factors interacted with the wider social and economic factors that influenced school performance along gender lines, while poverty and other forms of social disadvantages further magnified gender disparities depending on the geographical location of the area in question.
      "In Ghana, the completion rate for girls is consistently lower than that of boys," she said.

      She said the primary completion rate for girls in the year 2007 and 2008 was 82.4 percent as against 88.8 percent for boys, while that of the Junior High Schools stood at 62.6 for girls as against 72.3 percent for boys, with the tertiary level registering only 34 percent for females participating in education.
       She called on government and stakeholders to give consideration to the narrowing and not the elimination of the gender gap.
        Ms Abigail Adu-Poku, Girls Head Prefect, Armed Forces Secondary Technical School, Burma Camp, said generally all children were supposed to help their parents in various household chore and running errands for them, but any kind of work which exceeded the above may infringe upon the right of the child.
         She cited child prostitution, working in construction and mining sites and working excessively for long hours under conditions of isolation and being subjected to physical and sexual abuses as some examples of child labour.
         Ms Adu-Poku said girls engage in child labour for countless reasons with the most significant being poverty, adding that most economically poor families preferred sending their girl child out to work in order to earn money for the family, leading to adverse effects on the educational status of the girls.  
          She stressed on the benefits of educating the girl child who had the potential of impacting such knowledge to a wider audience than their male counterparts and if Ghana had lost sight that the whole nation would be deprived of education just for not educating one girl.
          She said child labour was a problem and responsibility to tackle the problem laid with the entire population with government at the forefront and teachers and parents having special roles to play.
GNA