CHILD AND FAMILY WELFARE POLICY WORKSHOP IN TAMALE BY MINISTRY OF GENDER CHILDREN AND SOCIAL PROTECTION IN COLLABORATION WITH UNICEF

A workshop on Child and Family Welfare Policy was held in Tamale yesterday by the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection at the Tamale Sports Stadium on May 24, 2016. The workshop which was supposed to start at 9am started around 10: 30am. The workshop  was chaired by Naa Bukari Andani.  Presentations  were made by Sylvester Kyei-Gyamfi and Chris Lartey on the policy, Child Protection Baseline \research Summary Report and Operational Plan 2016-2020 for the Implementation of the Child and Family Welfare Policy. Chris Lartey made mention of the fact that the policy was made solely for the Ghanaian and will not be implementable in other countries because they studied the Ghanaian culture and made the policy purposely for Ghana.

Speaking on the policy, the representative of UNICEF stressed that marrying the formal and informal to work on prevention instead of cure is the better option in all policies. Naa Andani advised all to make child upbringing a shared responsibility so as not to neglect our culture. He added that neglect can be attributed to poverty, ignorance and indifference and hoped the policy will be implementable to help all concerned.

Representative pf UNICEF giving her speech.

Cross section of participants during the presentations.

The Child and Family Welfare Policy Booklet in pictures.

The workshop was okay in my opinion considering the fact that persons with disabilities were not giving any form of representation. The organisers claim they invited them but none turned up. I think they could have done more to see to it that they represented to make the dissemination of the policy easy in that sector. Even the students who represented were from just two institutions; Tamale Senior High School and Ghana Senior High School all in Tamale. No other students represented. To top it, every student was giving fifty Ghana Cedis which I think was not necessary. These students were brought by their institutions and so that money for the transportation could have been given to their institutions to help organise workshops to educate their institutions since those who represented were just few.

One would have thought that participants will be varied but the turn up was just too low in my opinion. All in all, the food was good, snack was okay and the day one of the three day workshop closed in normal success.

Amoafowaa Sefa Cecilia