Child Trafficking
Child trafficking is, regrettably, a common occurrence in Ghana. Children are sold for their labour and sent away from home to work. Many children from the Northern Regions end up doing back-breaking labouring on farms, while others end up in towns as hawkers, porters or house help.
It is sheer desperation that causes families to send a child away. Many see it as an all-round benefit, imagining the child will be well looked after and become trained in a skill. The new "employers" give the families a one-off payment or a small regular stipend and the child is put to work. For the family, this stipend may be the funds needed to provide employment or to feed themselves.
However, the children are not well cared for. Apart from the emotional trauma of being sent away from their families, they are often forced to work in harsh conditions, have poor places to sleep, no access to health care and they are denied an education, not to mention the potential for child abuse.
Ghana passed a law prohibiting child trafficking in 2005 and is also a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Youth Alive is a keen advocate to ensure these important regulations are followed. We work with the Child Protection Network to educate communities about the realities of child trafficking and about the law; many people do not realise that child trafficking is illegal. Youth Alive hopes to be able to extend their support to these families, helping them secure a source of livelihood, preventing them from resorting to selling their child's labour.
Sex Workers and Sexual Abuse
Unfortunately sexual abuse and exploitation are commom, cross-cutting themes within our areas of work. Often young girls, and sometimes boys, who travel to towns to look for work will end up resorting to or being forced into prostitution. There is a high incidence of girls from the upper regions crossing the border to Burkina Faso in search of employment and, while they often tell family they are working for street food vendors, they are trapped in a distressing life of prostitution.
Sexual abuse is widespread. Unfortunately there are well known cases of abuse of school girls by teachers. This extreme abuse of power can be exercised in the form of blackmail for passing a class, or proof of a child's desperation to afford a school uniform.
Even more upsetting cases have been reported by our beneficiaries; for instance, some girls are sent to pick spilt grains from the market floor at dawn as their family's source of food. They can be afraid to return home without enough because they will be beaten. They have recounted that if they cannot collect enough grain they have submitted themselves to rape by the security guards minding the grain supplies in return just for the handful of grains they need to return home safely.
Youth Alive hope to reach more children to provide them with the sponsorship to attend education and avoid these dreadful situations.
Although in schools there can be a disappointing culture of cover-ups and the offending teacher's only punishment is being transferred to another school while the child may be expelled, the law should protect the child. Youth Alive aims to work with the Child Protection Network to ensure proper treatment of these cases and also promotes empowerment of our beneficiaries so that they know this is wrong and undeserved and we hope the good relationships with our field staff and the available counsellors, arranged through the Ghana Education Service, mean that they would have someone they could confide in.
