NGO saves three from street hawking

Sena Foundation and Pure City International School has teamed up to save three young girls and a mother from the annihilation of sun and street hawking and enrolled them into school.

The three girls were picked from Kaneshie and Caprice Traffic Light, under an initiative called Street Child Education Project.

The three salvaged girls were; a Nine years old Maame Ama whose burden of pushing her disabled Mother under the First Light Traffic to beg for arms was lifted. Maame had dropped out of school as early as Class One, soon after the demise of her late father. Maame Ama is amongst nine siblings of her parents. According to her, she wants to be a doctor and that she is grateful for the chance to go back to school to actualize her dream. Her mother told the National Pen that they traveled from Agona Kwanyako to Accra to beg for arms and return on a daily basis. A situation, the physically challenged woman bewailed, but have to engage in due to circumstances beyond her control.

Olivia Botwe, fourteen, leave with her Mum and Grandmother at Atico in the Okaikoi South Constituency in the Accra Metropolitan Area and sells sachet water at Kaneshie First Light. Though Olivia father stays at Dansoman, but with another woman and kids and have abdicated his paternal duties and warned her never to come close to where he is. Olivia has to abandoned her dream of becoming a nurse in JHS 1 to sell on the streets of Accra.

Thirteen-Year-Old Mary Obeng, also sells sachet water on the streets of Caprice with a step sister. Mary expressed mixed feelings and shed tears-of-joy as her stay on the streets was over. She said she used to attend school, until she moved to stay with her step mother where her dream was dashed. She said she sells for her step mother who gives her GH¢ 2.00 for food in the morning and evening.

One of the parent who was rescued with daughter and the daughter put in school under this project told the National Pen that they were overwhelmed by hunger and poverty that was why she allowed her child to engage in hawking, stating that she could not afford to sponsor the education of the child. Even though she is a Baker, she has no capital to setup.

‘Street hawking has huge implications for children’s physical and emotional well-being. It exposes them to sexual abuse, physical exhaustion, vehicle accidents, death and malnourishment and drug and substance abuse and prostitution’ Evelyn Kissi one of the directors of Sena Foundation said.

He noted that Child street hawking is common sight on streets in Ghana’s cities. Children sell products such as boiled groundnut, fruit and chips that they carry on trays balanced on their heads. The increase is the result of spiraling poverty and the worsening economic situation.

The Project Manager, Prince Kissi Yeboah, a girl child should be given all it takes to be trained as a responsible woman because a woman is directly or indirectly responsible for her child’s habits; including cleanliness, orderliness, conversation, eating, sleeping, manners, and general propriety of behavior.

Girl child should not be engaged to work outside the family to earn a living or to support their family’s income or hawk on the streets again to avert the impending danger. Because the future of girl child hawkers is miserable. At the end of the day, the girl child hawkers will graduate into prostitutes, armed robbers etc.

These children constitute valuable human resources needed to drive the economy of Ghana, they are potential doctors, engineers, administrators, journalists, etc. the consequences of abandoning these children to a cruel fate of hawking is too terrible to consider. Let’s not forget that the counterparts of these endangered Ghanaian children in other nations of the world are being groomed into informed and educated citizenry. Ghana needs girls that will grow to responsible women for proper nation building. A child left to grow up deformed, puffy, or arrogant will be an object of societal vices.

She said they are not going to allow those girls return to street hawking. He said they will do all they can to keep the girls in school. ‘We have gone through a lot before arriving at this conclusion, and wouldn’t want to compromise our objectives.