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Stakeholders Asked To Support The Fight To Reduce Child Labour

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Mr Joseph Amenowode, Chair of the
Select Committee on Employment, Social Welfare and State Affairs, on
Wednesday called on stakeholders to help support the fight to reducing
child labour in the country.

He said this could be done by
ensuring that children are given the opportunity to develop their
potential to contribute positively to national development.

Mr
Amenowode made the call at a press briefing in Accra following a new
child labour data released by the Ghana Statistical Service as part of
the Ghana Living Standards Survey.

He said the data revealed that
the total number of child labourers had increased over the last decade
by about half a million children, with the prevalence at one-in-five
children in child labour in Ghana, having hardly changed since the 2003
survey.

He said the report estimates that 1.9 million out of the
total population of 8.7 million children between five and 17 years are
in child labour, representing approximately 22 per cent, while 2.1
million, representing 14 per cent of all children were involved in
hazardous work.

He said according to the laws of Ghana not all
work done by children is classified as child labour, and should be
targeted for elimination.

The children’s Act allows children of a
particular age range to do light work that does not affect their
health, and personal development, or interfere with their schooling.

Mr
Amenowode said child labour is clearly different from acceptable work
which is the normal way of growing up in preparation for adulthood. It
constitutes unacceptable work for children because the child is either
too young for the work or it prevents him or her from benefiting fully
from education.

The forms of child labour prevalent in Ghana
include, stone cracking, agriculture, illegal mining, commercial sexual
exploitation of children, child domestic servitude, carrying of heavy
loads among others.

He noted that globally child labour has
reduced from 246 million in 2000 to an estimated 168 million children in
2012, according to the latest ILO Global Child Labour Report.

He
however noted that most of the decline took place in Asia, clearly
showing that child labour can be reduced with the right intervention,
whereas the decline in Sub-Saharan Africa has been slow.

Mr
Amenowode said the involvement of children in these activities has
serious implications for their education and health; they lose out on
quality education because they miss several classroom contact hours.

“Child
labour contributes to the perpetuation of poverty. It is a national and
indeed global problem, not only because it contributes to the school
dropout rate and performance , but also because, by keeping children out
of school it breeds another cycle of people who most likely will be
less well off or end up in poverty later,” he added.

He said
government has since independence recognised the problem of child labour
and has put in place a comprehensive legal framework to deal with it.

He
noted that Ghana’s parliament is also engaged in national efforts to
address child labour, adding that, apart from passing legislation,
parliament is represented on the National Steering Committee on Child
Labour.

Parliament also scrutinizes and approves government’s
plans and budgets to address child labour and holds government to
account for progress, he added.

Mr Amenowode said a platform of
ECOWAS parliamentarians against child labour was also launched in
November last year with the support of ILO to expand solidarity, provide
mutual support and improve effectiveness through sharing experience and
knowledge on innovative, replicable and sustainable solutions to
eliminating child labour.

He said despite various national and
sub-national policy frameworks, including legal instruments and
developmental plans to deal with the scourge, child labour still
continues to be pervasive in the country and all must come on board to
support the fight to its logical conclusion.

 
 
 
Source: GNA

Kofi Oppong Kyekyeku

I am a Ghanaian Broadcast Journalist/Writer who has an interest in General News, Sports, Entertainment, Health, Lifestyle and many more.

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