WORKSHOP ON CHILD LABOUR HELD IN KUMASI (PAGE 47)

THE Deputy Minister of Employment and Social Welfare, Mr Antwi Boasiako Sekyere, has sent a note of caution to parents and children not to see child labour as a consequence but as a cause of poverty and under-development.
He said children subjected to extreme forms of exploitation, with little or no education, were likely to grow to be illiterate adults, while the prosperity of the country depended greatly on the quality of its human resource base, which was the youth
“Therefore, to tolerate child labour is inconsistent with the massive investment the nation is making,” he stressed.
Mr Boasiako Sekyere was addressing a three-day inception workshop for co-ordinating directors of district assemblies, NGOs, directors of Labour, Social Welfare, Education and Statistics drawn from the Central, Eastern and Volta regions in Kumasi.
He said the Employment and Social Welfare Ministry, in collaboration with COCOBOD and other partners, was stepping up efforts to eliminate the worst forms of child labour in the cocoa sector in particular and other sectors of society.
Accordingly, he said since the inception of the National Programme to Eliminate the Worst Forms of Child Labour in Cocoa (NPECLC), the ministry had conducted pilot and scale-up surveys, which had helped to ascertain the extent and nature of child labour in the sector, which the International Cocoa Verification Board (ICVB) had accepted.
He announced that remediation activities had been implemented in 11 districts and 110 communities and that currently more than 1,200 children were being provided with support to pursue formal education, including vocational skills.
The support include the provision of learning materials, footwear, school bags and uniforms, psychological counselling and health.
The Ashanti Regional Manager of the COCOBOD, Mr S. E. Bissiw, said since the emergence of the issue of child labour, the government had demonstrated its commitment to lead the fight and support its elimination.
He announced that the board had given nearly GH¢1.3 million to support the expansion of remediation activities in additional 36 cocoa districts and hoped the fund would help increase awareness of the issue.
The National Programme Manager of the NPECLC, Mrs Rita Owusu-Amankwah, for her part, said the workshop had become necessary to scale up remediation interventions to cover more districts and by the turn of the year they would have covered 47 cocoa districts out of the existing 64.
She said this year would see at least 470 communities scaled up and stakeholders in that service encouraged to make their activities known to the national programme.