The complex causes that drive children to the streets and to begging have poverty at their root, but exploitation of children is also at work. There are transnational elements, as child begging can be a coping mechanism for refugees and recent migrants. Many children are part of families that have emigrated from troubled Sahelian countries. Others are caring for disabled parents and relatives.
Enforcement of laws prohibiting child begging1 and addressing truancy, as education is compulsory, is difficult in practice. Positive incentives like school meals can help but are plainly insufficient. Street children begging thus persists and is even reported to be on the rise.
Children begging is a part and a symptom of three broad challenges, with specific Ghanaian features: children who are not in school, widespread child labor, and patterns of forced migration. In other West African countries, Muslim schools often rely on students begging for support and as a form of instilling discipline, but that is less common in Ghana.
Despite progress in expanding school enrollment, UNICEF reports that nearly 623,500 children of primary school age in Ghana were not enrolled in primary school and one out of four children in the kindergarten age range—from four to five years old—are not in preschool. The 2010 national census indicated that 20% of children with physical disabilities were not attending school. Children begging is part of the out-of-school problem, with complex causes including de facto costs of “free education,” parents’ need for the revenues that come from begging, and cultural factors.
Ghana has one of the highest rates of child labor by country in the world, with about 21% of the child population in the country participating in some form of child labor. Most child labor is in rural areas, but street begging in cities is part of the phenomenon. Widespread advocacy and action to address child labor encompass diverse groups that include many with religious inspiration.
Many children begging in Accra come from the north and many are part of families forced to migrate from countries where conflict and instability are rife. The scale of forced migration in the region is one of the world’s “masked” problems, and sadly children forced to beg for food and livelihoods is one manifestation.
Thus, family poverty is the main driver of child begging. However, factors that aggravate the situation include ignorance—lack of awareness of the law and of Islamic teachings that frown on begging—and the limited support available to forced migrants. Muslim leaders and educators in Ghana, as elsewhere, are divided on causes of the phenomenon, its consequences, and optimal solutions.
Seeing children begging in the streets can wring the heartstrings of those who encounter them. Simple solutions are elusive. What’s needed are more integrated approaches that draw on experience that engage both religious and non-religious leaders, educators and human rights specialists, and social workers.
Notes
1 Section 87(1-2) of the Children’s Act, 1998 (Act 560), outlaws exploitative child labor, defined as any work that impairs a child’s health, education, or development. Section 6 upholds the fundamental rights of every child, including the rights to life, dignity, respect, leisure, freedom, health, education, and parental care.
