The Vice President, Professor Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, has called for the establishment of an urgent inter-ministerial committee to address the growing number of children living and working on the streets across the country.

She stressed the need for a coordinated national response to ensure that children’s welfare is prioritised in all aspects of Ghana’s development agenda and to enable affected children to return to school and grow into responsible adults.

Professor Opoku-Agyemang said ministries, departments and agencies, legal aid institutions, and civil society organisations must establish robust mechanisms to remove more than 60,000 children currently living and working on the streets, many of whom have dropped out of school.

The Vice President made the call yesterday at a three-day Strategic Planning Retreat (SPR), an intensive workshop focused on seven priority issue areas critical to the well-being of Ghanaian children.

These areas include accelerating progress on child-centred deaths, eliminating stunting, anaemia and open defecation, improving literacy and numeracy proficiency in schools, ending child marriage and reducing adolescent pregnancy, and ensuring that every child is counted.

The retreat was held under the theme: “Planning Together for a Better Future for Children and Adolescents in Ghana.”

Professor Opoku-Agyemang noted that Ghana has achieved between 95 and 97 per cent coverage for key vaccinations during the first year of a child’s life. While commending the progress, she urged stakeholders to collaborate to reach the remaining three per cent of children who are still not vaccinated.

She observed that disparities between urban and rural areas had narrowed over the past three decades, with improvements in school enrolment and completion rates, particularly from kindergarten to junior high school. She also noted that child marriage and early unions had declined in some parts of the country in recent years.

“Still, there are obstacles to meeting child-related Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, which is just four years away. Over 60,000 children are living and working on the streets in our country, mainly in urban centres, many of whom are not registered at birth,” she said.

The Vice President added that many children remain deprived in terms of health, education, nutrition, water, sanitation, housing and protection, noting that child poverty undermines health and learning while increasing exposure to violence and exploitation.

She warned that these challenges threaten Ghana’s demographic dividend and aspirations for inclusive growth.

The United Nations Resident Coordinator, Mr Zia Choudhury, said the quality of proposals emerging from the workshop reflected the strength of Ghana’s technical leadership and commitment to ensuring that policies and programmes prioritise children’s welfare.

The Director-General of the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC), Dr Audrey Smock Amoah, also noted that the retreat had highlighted the urgency of reducing child marriage, early unions and adolescent pregnancy.