DISTRICTWORK

DISTRICT WORK:

In 2013, after 20 years working with street children in Accra- Ghana, CAS recognized that the problems of "out of school" children cannot be solved by the work of NGOs only. The number of children who do not go to school are increasing daily, the problems in the streets are increasing as well. Several children get involved in crime, prostitution, or drug addiction. And some can easily brainwashed and get involved in extremism.

In October 1992, the time CAS started, most of the children could be found in the centre of the city where they could find jobs to survive. When numbers grew and the city infrastructure changed, children moved to the outskirts and could also be located in the suburbs.

Majority of these children were migrant children who came from the rural areas of Ghana and surrounding countries. Many of these children grew up in the city and "married" unofficially. Babies were born and together with their parents remained in the city. Children of poor families are already in the streets and their total numbers increased and now many can be found in all social welfare districts of the greater Accra region.

In 2009, CAS, SAID and the Department of Social Welfare conducted a research with the financial support of Ricerca an Italian donor. The headcount showed that 61,492 " Out of School" children (migrant children, those born on the street and urban poor children) were in the streets of the Region.

As a result, CAS planned to get more social workers of the department involved in street work. These workers have to be trained. With the assistance of Streetinvest, an NGO from the UK, ten workers were trained in 2009. The plan is to train at least two workers for each district office. Social Welfare has 16 districts in the Region.

CAS has applied to 100% for children a Danish NGO for financial assistance to carry-out this training as well as the work in the districts. Promoting children's rights and teaching functional literacy. 100% for children is in turn working with CISU to obtain financial backing for this exercise.

While working on the application, CAS workers have started to do some preliminary investigation in the districts to update the existing information and pretesting. We want to determine where the children live and work and to know which NGOs are already operating.

Three teams of workers are carrying out this investigation besides their normal work at CAS. The districts are visited on three occasions to obtain full report on each district. We hope we will be able to work with other NGOs and CAS is trying to obtain work agreements with some of them.