At 6:30 pm, 17-year-old Mamunatu was busily sweeping the frontage of a blue kiosk at the Mallam Ata market in Accra preparing the place for the night’s sleep after more than 12 hours of carrying heavy loads for customers. The rising dust from her sweeping made her one-year-old baby, strapped to her back with a dirty green cloth, rather uncomfortable. Mamunatu arrived in Accra from Tamale 18 months ago with high hopes. “I came [to Accra] because I wanted money; there is no work for me in Tamale and when I gave birth to my son my parents wanted me to marry her father. I want to make some money so I can buy myself some cloth and other items I need to go into marriage,” she said. She makes between five and 10 Ghana cedis a day. To save some money, Mamunatu eats once while she feeds her one-year-old daughter twice a day. “I have a child. I want her to go to school and that is another reason why I must do this job. If I had my way I will simply return to Tamale but I am afraid of what to expect,” she told me. As per the definition of the 1992 constitution, both mother and daughter are children. This is the reality on the streets of Accra. The 2009 US State Department Trafficking in Persons Report, estimates that over 30,000 children are working as porters or kayaye in Accra alone and the phenomenon remains a major setback to Ghana’s attainment of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Sheema Sen Gupta heads the United Nations Child Protection Programme at UNICEF, Ghana. I went to her office as I began my journey to understand the phenomenon of Ghana’s new generation of street children and mothers. She told me it is important to situate the problem within the context of the MDGs as a fundamental blueprint for development. “I think when we think about these underprivileged children and we just look around us, those of us in Accra, even if we just look around us and we look at the streets and we see the number of children on the streets, what does it tell you? Are these the children who have access to all the rights we talked about? You know, are these kids in school? So that kind of tell you about the MDG two about universal education for all, where are these kids these kids are supposed to be in school. Poverty, that is one of the reasons why they are on the streets, health, we also know that these kids do have babies on the streets, what about the maternal health issue just on the street?” she said. She told me that Ghana, like all signatories to the MDGs, has five more years to meet the target and things are not looking good. “…and that kind of raises the question…where are we and is the same question you are asking and I think it is clear to us that if we don’t do something about this population, we are not going to get there, in terms of education, in terms of poverty and health services,” Ms Gupta said. I met Belikisu on my second visit to the Mallam Ata market. She is eight years old and she had been in Accra for only two weeks. She wore a disheveled hair with a faded dirty dress and she was barefooted as she went around the market carrying heavy loads for customers in the scorching Accra sun. She skillfully balanced her load-carrying pan on her head as we spoke in the presence of her aunt, Salamatu, who brought her down from the Northern region. Salamatu spoke to me in Mamprusi as a fellow porter helped with the translation in Twi. “Her mother is my sister. She begged me to bring her to Accra. She did not have money to take care of her, she was forced to stop school. Myself, I did not have any money so I brought her. I know it’s difficult for her but there is nothing I can do,” Salamatu indicated. Salamatu herself, as we spoke, had an 18-month-old baby boy strapped to her back. I later found out the baby boy was a twin. The other twin was with a colleague porter. Eight-year-old Belikisu was concerned about where they would all be sleeping that night. “We sleep at the Mallam Ata market. We always pray it does not rain but when it rains we hide under the shade in front of a store and the rain does not beat us,” she said. As I left Belikisu and her aunt behind at the Mallam Ata market, I wondered why I had heard so little about the fathers in the lives of these children. They certainly must have fathers and the mothers must have surely been impregnated by a man. Bright Appiah, the Executive Director of Child’s Right International showed me a number of legislative documents on the rights of the child and the responsibility of a parent. “At the end of the day, it’s the women that suffer the consequences of that action. Parenting is gradually breaking down and children now don’t feel safe. Within our society the responsibility lies with the father to make sure that you really care for your children but in certain cultural systems you realize that because we have various cultures and the way we practice them it makes it very difficult to pursue certain issues in context of the law but I think that no matter what it is I think that the father should be responsible to make sure that the child gets what he or she wants and I think that in the face of our cultural diversity it is the law that can prevail,” he said. Ghana has one of the best legal regimes for children in the whole of Africa. The country was the first in the world to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child on 5th February 1990 even before it became international law. There is a whole chapter in the constitution on the right of the child, there is the juvenile justice act passed in 2003, there is the Children’s Act, 1998 and there are a dozen more other adopted national policies on children. So why are we not making progress? Sheema Sen Gupta of UNICEF said: “In terms of looking at the legislations that are in place Ghana has made a lot of progress in that. I think where some of the issues are of course is in the implementation and taking that forward.” And human rights advocate Bright Appiah comes to the same conclusion but adds it’s a little too late to do something about it now. “The strategy is not working and I am saying that it has passed the stage where we could say that we can do something about, looking at how the interventions are failing it means that we have reached a crisis stage that we are not able to rescue those issues. Ghana’s law is one of the best and I feel that when we implement it I don’t think that we will see any single person on the street so enforcement is an issue where I think that we’ve all failed.” Even the Women and Children’s Affairs Ministry responsible for addressing the problem concedes it has failed. “We need political will and its implementation and enforcement and that is where the government has fallen short,” Madam Mariamah Yayah, Acting National Director of the Department of Children at the Ministry, said. In June last year, her department started registering porters across the country for planning and policy implementation purposes. Some 2,432 porters were registered in Mokola, Kokomba and Agbogloshie markets in Accra alone but the project stopped due to lack of funds. “The thing is that with the children’s act it is the department of social welfare that has to implement most of the actions in the act but we see that social welfare is under resourced. They don’t have the money and they don’t have the logistics to work with and that is where the problem is…,” Madam Yayah added. As I was confronted with the issues, I headed to the Social Welfare Department to gain a deeper insight. The Children’s Act 1998 makes the department the implementing body. Despite this enormous responsibility, it receives less than 1.6 percent of the annual budget for the Ministry of Employment and Social Welfare. So in the midst of the challenges, is there any hope for this new generation of street children? The focal person for street children at the department, Alois Kyaakpier Mohl, had some answers to my question. “I am an optimist and I believe that life cannot just be useless for any creation of God. My worry is how these NGOs and civil society organizations and, indeed, business concerns including JOY FM have always liaised with the appropriate authority to see what are the issues and how together can we respond to it. The Department of Social Welfare has not only got the skill but they have the latitude all they need is the appropriate support and push,” he said. It’s obvious that the life of the next generation is at stake and like the song writer says in a classic piece, it is time to lend a hand to the likes of the Social Welfare Department because there are people dying, but also most importantly not to relent in demanding some seriousness and commitment from our political leaders. If we fail there shall be consequences. This is how the song goes: We can see it; it’s the breaking up of families. You know Africa and Ghana in particular prides itself in the strong family links we have and if those links start breaking up it’s basically society and the basic social structures that are going to break up. And then its going to be each one for his own, no one is going to look out for the other, no support system. Of course in addition to that there also this distress that people in Accra and the cities have, if you look at the person on the street, oh he is a criminal. You have a high rate of teenage pregnancy on the street having an impact not only on the health of the babies but on the health of those girls. You know, so you just see it all crumbling down if this keeps increasing… In the midst of the doom and gloom, there’s a glimmer of hope. Mathew Soputamit was busy behind his computer finding technical solutions for the Ghana Community Network Services Limited or GCNet. He is the Deputy Chief Technical Officer for GCNet. He grew up at Tongo in the Upper East, bracing the odds, refusing to be lured to Accra in search of greener pastures, despite the abject poverty. “We use to walk like 10 kilometers just by the hills through a graveyard to school. And sometimes you have to go very early it was really a difficult time and the hamatan season I tell you very hot and we walked barefooted. In March when the weather is damn hot we were walking barefooted to school. I will tell you the truth I even once went to Bolga and work in the butcher house. I was selling kebab. I have sold kebab before,” he told me. Mr. Soputamit is now a qualified engineer. He said there are genuine challenges in the North, chief among them is poverty, which is forcing many, mostly children, to flee to the south. But he said there are still opportunities that government and civil society must emphasize. “We faced the odds and that is why when I see those girls coming here I sympathize with them but it’s not sustainable. What people can do to help them is not… I am not saying that we should not support them here, but we should tackle the root cause. What can we do to prevent them from coming because every time they will come because the temptation is there and at the early age it is not everybody who can resist the temptation so we need to go down there and support,” he said. And government appears to be listening as it prepares to rule out a new approach to solve the problem. Madam Mariamah Yayah, Director of the Department of Children at the Ministry of Women and Children Affairs, outlines the new strategy. “Previously the women and children affairs, the social welfare and UNICEF trained some of the kayayei and send them back home but within the shortest possible time some of these kayayei came back. So what we want to do now is now look at it from a holistic point of view. First and foremost we have to talk to the kayayei, find out from them if they want to go back home, find out from them what trade they want to go into and also we have to talk to their parents back at home because some of them have been sent here because their parents have asked them to come and also talk to the chief and if possible the district assemblies to ensure that when these kayayei go back they will stay and have something meaningful to do to raise their standards of living.” Meanwhile, back at the Mallam Ata market, the 17-year-old Mamunatu, eight-year-old Belikisu and her aunt are still waiting to see some action beyond the rhetoric. Until that happens, they will continue to carry loads that break their backs and put little or nothing on their tables. This feature was couched from a radio feature filed by Joy FM's Evans Mensah about street life in Accra