Principal labour officer calls for enforcement of child labour laws
Mrs Stella Ofori, Principal Labour Officer, Child Labour Unit of the Labour Department of the Ministry of Employment and Social Welfare, has called for the enforcement of Child labour laws in the elimination of the menace in the communities.
“Ghana has a comprehensive legal framework for addressing child labour but the enforcement is weak and uncoordinated,” she said.
Mrs Ofori was speaking at a two-day district level stakeholders consultative workshop for Cocoa growing areas at Asankragwa in the Wassa Amenfi West District of the Western Region on Thursday.
The workshop was organised by the International Labour Organisation in collaboration with the Ministry of Employment and Social Welfare and the Wassa Amenfi West District Assembly on the new Cocoa Community Project (CCP) to eliminate the worst forms of child labour in Cocoa growing areas.
The Project is titled “Towards Child Labour-Free Cocoa Growing Communities in Cote D’lvoire and Ghana through an integrated area based approach”.
She said there was the need to train law enforcement agencies on the existence of child labour laws, since most of them did not know the law existed.
Mrs Ofori said the judiciary also needed to be trained to better understand the pertinent issues pertaining to child labour to inform their judgement on child labour cases.
She said Government had established and launched a National Plan of Action (NPA) aimed at promoting a more coordinated effort towards the elimination of worst forms of child labour.
“It is also to provide an integrated framework for harmonising all relevant action by different partners in order to facilitate the problem in a well coordinated and sustainable manner,” she added.
“The main objective of this NPA is to reduce the worst forms of child labour to the barest minimum by 2015, while laying strong social, policy and institutional foundation for the elimination and prevention of all forms of child labour in the longer term,” she noted.
She explained that the plan had nine prioritised areas in the elimination process including child trafficking, Ritual servitude, Commercial sexual exploitation of children, fisheries, mining and quarrying, agriculture (Cocoa), child domestic servitude and street hawking among others.
Mrs Lalaina Razafindrakoto, Resource Person from ILO, said the project would use the integrated based approach that would focus on the improvement of the working conditions of children above the minimum age so to remove the hazards and make them licit.
She said the approach would also improve the implementation of national child protection and child labour legislation including attention to child trafficking where relevant.
“It would also facilitate the natural link between the fight against child labour and the promotion of youth employment and utilize and expand the county’s child labour monitoring systems,” she added.
She stressed the need to promote innovation through partnerships, since child labour was very complex and called for the mainstreaming of child labour in the Cocoa agenda of all the partners.
Source: GNA