ATHE Deputy Minister of Employment and Social Welfare, Mr Antwi-Boasiako Sekyere, has advised operators of orphanages to be primarily concerned with the interest of children under their care.
Sharing his thoughts on the proliferation of orphanages in certain parts of the country with the Daily Graphic in Tamale, he said some of “the children in these orphanages are not orphans but are put there by greedy and selfish people who use them to solicit alms in kind and in cash for their personal gains”.
He said in some cases the practice of keeping children in these institutions was now counter-productive and should be discouraged.
Mr Antwi-Boasiako explained that over the years, the practice of keeping children in such institutions was viewed as the most appropriate option for offering care, support and protection for needy children, but pointed out that the practice was now different as most operators of those institutions did not have the paramount interest of the children at heart.
Mr Antwi-Boasiako said, for instance, that the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed over the decades between the Government of Ghana and Save Our Souls (SOS) Villages must be reviewed, stressing that, “We have operated under this document since then but times have changed, situations differ now from then and it is about time we revisited that document to bring it up-to-date with current developments in the field of child protection”.
The minister, however, acknowledged that the SOS Villages ran community-based social and educational programmes in the surrounding communities within which they operated and described that initiative as a better childcare option.
The Northern Regional Director of the Department of Social Welfare, Mr John Ankrah, said children should grow in a family setting.
He, however, explained that although allowing children to grow in institutions retarded their emotional and brain development, that did not contribute to the breakdown of the nuclear and extended family systems.
Mr Ankrah attributed the breakdown of family structures to industrialisation resulting in rural-urban migration and said when people migrated to the cities for ‘greener pastures’, they got detached from their nuclear and extended families as most of them were unable to attend funerals and other social gatherings or support their families economically.
He said in law, the orphanages were referred to as residential homes for children in the Children’s Act and stressed the need for operators of orphanages to operate their facilities as such, by providing them with the needed care, support, love and training to enhance their growth and development.
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